I 



I 



MODERN POETS 



AND 



CHRISTIAN TEACHING 



ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 



BY 

MARTHA FOOTE CROW 




NEWYORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 






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LIBRARY of CONuttESS] 
Two Copies Het;t»iyv3 

NOV 29 i90? 

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Copyright, 1907, by 
EATON & MAINS. 




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TO 

THE DEAR MEMORY OF 

E. B. B. 

TO KNOW HER BETTER HAS BEEN TO 

LOVE HER MORE AND TO 

LOVE GOD MORE 



CONTENTS 

Chapter ^*^_^ 

Prefatory Note . - - - vii 

I. Life and Creed - - - " ' ^ 

II. God and the World - - - - 20 

III. The Realms of Mysticism - - - - 46 

IV. The Christ ----- 69 
V. The Worid of Nature - - - "93 

VI. The World of Mankind - - " "7 

VII. Man and Woman - - - " " ^43 

VIII. Patriotism and Politics - - - 168 

IX. The Adopted Land - - " " ^^^ 

X. Art and Life 2°^ 

XI. The Poet's Mission - - " " 218 

Biographical Notes - - " - 227 

Index "9 



PREFATORY NOTE 

It seems impossible to consider the poetry of 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning apart from her life and 
personality. Perhaps we may say the same of any 
poet; yet in her case the poetry so vividly glorifies 
the life, and the life so clearly elucidates the poetry, 
that the temptation is imminent at every point to 
drop into the story-like and alluring sidepaths of 
her biography. If the reader feels that this vol- 
ume errs too frequently in that respect, he is asked 
to recall the words of another poet: 

What's done we partly may compute, 
But know not what's resisted. 

On the other hand, for the benefit of another kind 
of reader who may like to relate the poems re- 
ferred to in this volume to some definite structure 
of her life, a chart of the most important events is 
appended and an index will lead to the identifica- 
tion of poems, places, and incidents mentioned in 
the text. The edition of her works referred to in 
the notes in this volume is the Cambridge Edition 
(Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1900). Refer- 
ences to Mrs. Browning's correspondence are made 
to the two volumes of her "Letters," edited by 

Frederic G. Kenyon (The Macmillan Company, 

vii 



viii Prefatory Note 

1897); to Volume I of the "Life, Letters, and Es- 
says of Elizabeth Barrett Browning," containing 
the letters addressed to Richard Hengist Home 
(New York, Worthington Company, 1889); and to 
the two volumes of the "Letters of Robert and 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-46" (Harper & 
Brothers, 1899). However, in this book no delib- 
erate attempt is made at literary criticism or at bi- 
ography, except as they throw light upon the poet's 
thought. Whenever possible Mrs. Browning's 
own language is used with her own italics and ex- 
pressive little dots; and the letters have been 
searched for illustrative passages. 



CHAPTER I 

LIFE AND CREED 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning richly desen^es 
a place in a group of poets who gave expression 
through their divine art to Christian teaching. She 
was essentially a religious poet; the spirit of re- 
ligion pervades and irradiates every page she wrote. 
But it was not any monastic ideal, any spirit of 
worship in selfish seclusion, that she set forth. 
Her real spirit lived in the world; she was part of 
the very current and passion of it, and she trans- 
muted the humblest elements of life as she knew it 
into heavenly radiances. Still there was sometimes 
the ecstasy of the devotee in her hours of inspira- 
tion, and the rapture of the seer of visions. She 
lived with visions for her company, she says in one 
of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," and they 
were "gentle mates" to her; she would not ask for 
sweeter music than they made. Nor would we ! 

One of several misapprehensions in the public 
mind with regard to the poetry of Mrs. Browning is 
that it is permeated with a spirit of melancholy. 
Quite the contrary is the case. Her poems are 
earnest; they are filled with religious devotion; but 
to all who do not think that a religious motive is 



2 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

in itself a doleful thing they are joy-giving and 
courage-inspiring. She takes the fact of sorrow 
in the world for granted — as who must not! — but 
she then proceeds in every way to lessen it by giv- 
ing consolation, the best consolations that she can 
draw from her own personal experiences, and from 
her visions of spiritual possibilities. Let us sing, 
she cries, who wear immortal w4ngs within. 

And her life was indeed rich in the sorrows that 
make sympathy grow and bloom. Though always 
intensely vibrating to the world outside, she lived 
for years an invalid. Her health is believed to 
have been first broken by an injury to the spine 
received in her early youth. Then her delicacy 
was increased by a shock which came in 1840, at 
the death of a brother, an event which happened 
under peculiarly painful circumstances — a drown- 
ing in a smooth sea, beneath a fair sky, and almost 
before her very eyes. So for many years she was 
confined to her room at her father's house in Lon- 
don; and that father, an autocrat in his family, 
made up his mind that Elizabeth's fate was to fade 
gradually and beautifully away to a poetic and 
spiritual translation, and he could not, it seems, 
grasp the idea of a possible recovery for her. 
Therefore he thought she should be made to let 
her mind dwell upon her end; and, praying nightly 
by her bedside, he resented any suggestion other 



Life and Creed 3 

than an early death for her. In such an atmos- 
phere she spent the earlier years of her woman- 
hood, hermetically sealed as it were from any 
breath of health-giving pure fresh air and shrouded 
in the fogs of London. At last there came a phy- 
sician's decision that she could not live through 
another winter in that climate; and here it must 
be regretfully admitted that her wealthy father re- 
fused to allow her to go to a climate better adapted 
to her needs, though there were brothers and sisters 
who could have conveniently accompanied her. It 
was this seeming disregard for her life and health 
which broke the daughter's heart and which was 
finally the deciding element in her life plans. Had 
Elizabeth Barrett lived in our day of the woman 
doctor and the fresh-air treatment, it is almost cer- 
tain that she would not only have been lifted out 
of the habits of invalidism, but would have been 
repaired and strengthened into vigorous bodily 
activity. This seems all the more likely from the 
fact that her health did steadily improve from the 
day when Robert Browning rescued her and bore 
her away to a climate where she could live and 
be comparatively well. Her marriage brought joy, 
it brought Italy and the normal sunlight and out- 
doors she needed. It was not long before she was 
climbing mountains. 

It seemed absolutely necessary to mention the 



4 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

father of Elizabeth Barrett; and since that is done, 
another word must be added. It is now well 
known that when a daughter of his thought of 
marriage, that child risked an anger on his part so 
extreme that it amounted to an insanity. Such an 
act was a defiance of his fatherly authority and a 
transference of loyalty to another head. Other 
fathers have had the same notion of parental rights : 
it was unfortunate that to this delicate treasure of 
poetic life should have been assigned a father of 
this kind. 

The whole story of her course is minutely writ- 
ten out in her letters to Robert Browning and to 
some of her intimate friends at the time that she 
took the great step of leaving the roof of that fa- 
ther and so cutting the tie that bound her to him. 
All the world may know the incidents of that pas- 
sage, and the whole world has justified her in every 
detail. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett 
were married in Marylebone Church between quar- 
ter to eleven and quarter past eleven in the fore- 
noon, on the twelfth of September, 1846, and im- 
mediately thereafter they separated until such time 
as they could arrange to go south together. At one 
o'clock of that day he is writing the first letter to 
his wife, and he says: "Words can never tell you, 
however — form them, transform them, anyway, — 
how perfectly dear you are to me — perfectly dear 



Life and Creed 5 

to my heart and soul. I look back, and in every 
one point, every v^ord and gesture, every letter, 
every silence — you have been entirely perfect to me 
— I would not change one word, one look. My 
hope and aim are to preserve this love, not to fall 
from it — for which I trust to God who procured it 
for me, and doubtlessly can preserve it.'* With 
this poet lover we can also say that we would not 
change one of Elizabeth Barrett's words, one of her 
looks — she has been entirely perfect to us also, en- 
tirely perfect to the judgment of the world. 

This was the second heartbreak of her life, and the 
pain lasted until her death. Many times she wrote 
from Italy to her father, but when she came to 
England the letters were sent back to her un- 
opened. And this was the more poignant grief 
to her because of the fact that some of the en- 
velopes had been marked with the black border of 
mourning. 

Out of the great pity that everyone must feel for 
the sorrows heaped upon the frail life of the great 
woman and poet, must be born a gratitude that 
such experiences could result in the development 
of that sympathy, that bravery, that insight, which 
are her treasured qualities, while none of these re- 
buffs of fate could destroy her independence of 
mind and her passion for poetry, or weaken her 
power to act which rose so gloriously effective when 



6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

she took her life in her hands and went forth to 
Italy with that perfect lover and husband, Robert 
Browning. The end of the story is the justifica- 
tion of her every deed. Mrs. Jameson, with whom 
the newly married pair journeyed southward, said, 
*'You are not improved, you are transformed!'' 
And the renewal of health, the development of 
power both mental and physical, and the broaden- 
ing and deepening of experience which were the 
results of her change of home, together with the 
illumination of life that came with the birth of her 
child, make an unanswerable plea — if such were 
needed — to relieve her of every trace of blame. 
Beyond the nobility of her husband as a man and 
his genius as a poet she placed the ''strange 
straight sympathy" which united them on all sub- 
jects. **I take it for pure magic — this life of 
mine," she said; " surely nobody was ever so happy 
before." Her perfect happiness was justification 
enough. But, in fact, a justification would not 
have been needed, had the results been less happy; 
yet it is a peculiar satisfaction to be able to be- 
reave the world of every imaginable ground for 
cavil. 

These romantic features in Mrs. Browning's life 
have made perhaps an overcurious interest in her 
personality; however this may be, there is scarcely 
a poet whose life is so fully laid before the world. 



Life and Creed 7 

This IS well. There is not a flaw to conceal. Her 
poetry has been an inestimable gift to all people 
in the world who can take life through poetry, and 
through them to those who cannot, to the up- 
lifting in the end of all; and her life, by afford- 
ing the example of a perfect and equal union of 
the loftiest and most highly endowed human 
souls, which was at first in this case a hazardous 
experiment, but yet which has proved at every 
moment and in the end, from every point of view, 
a complete and triumphant success — this is a gift 
to the world which in preciousness is almost a 
rival to the poetry. And that this should not be 
lost to a world acutely in need of proof to estab- 
lish its belief in such a possibility is ample justifi- 
cation for giving forth those sacred love letters, 
although that involved a publicity from which 
many true lovers of the two poets shrank at the 
time. If it is of supreme value to the progress of 
humanity that men and women shall learn to 
live happily together, founding homes that give 
a foretaste of heaven and that bear on to the com- 
ing generations a torch of faith and hope, then the 
love letters together with the other letters and 
poems bearing on the relations of these two great 
poets form one of the greatest treasures that the 
human race possesses. 

Beyond the intensification of her power of sym- 



8 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

pathy with the sorrowing, none of Mrs. Browning's 
private griefs left impress upon her poems. There 
is no reference to her father save in one dedication, 
and then only with the most fiHal tenderness and 
respect. A poem called "De Profundis," written 
soon after the death of her brother though not 
published until i860, may be taken as having 
shown the triumph of her spirit in that hour of 
almost unbearable grief; but this is the sole poem 
that may be supposed to refer to that dark passage 
in her days that "must go on." 

Whatever's lost, it first was won; 

We will not struggle nor impugn. 

Perhaps the cup was broken here, 

That Heaven's new wine might show more clear. 

I praise Thee while my days go on. 

If Other great sorrow pierced her heart the world 
has not heard the cry, for she shows the greatest 
refinement and seclusion of spirit in regard to her 
personal life. Even the love sonnets, the story of 
her own love, she did not show to Robert Brown- 
ing until after their marriage; then upon a certain 
day, as Browning many years after told a friend, 
she thrust them secretly into his pocket and ran 
away while he read them; and when upon his in- 
sistence they were printed it was under the dis- 
guise, or half-disguise, of the now so well known 
name, the "Sonnets from the Portuguese." She 
had sometime been playfully called by Robert 



Life and Creed 9 

Browning his **own little Portuguese"; ^hence the 
poetic title to the poem. 

It is evident to the reader of Mrs. Browning's 
poetry that she must have been reared among the 
conventions of strictly evangelical orthodoxy. In 
the Barrett household the child Elizabeth was 
surrounded by the atmosphere of the congrega- 
tional dissenting church; and through life, in her 
correspondence, she always says, "my friends the 
dissenters." "I am a dissenter," she declares fre- 
quently, and sometimes adds, "and a believer in 
a universal Christianity." "Truth (as far as each 
thinker can apprehend) and love" made up her 
idea of a church creed even in the earlier days 
when she seems to have been surrounded by fierce 
wranglings among minor divisions of sects. 

We may think of her in young childhood as 
going to a little chapel with her father; but even 
then, it seems, it was by her own choice that she 
did so. There must have been a great spirit of 
independence in the family, for she speaks of the 
"many-colored theologies" of the house; and she 
chose her sect "from liking the simplicity of that 
speaking and praying without books — and a little, 
too, from disliking the theory of state churches," 

iln allusion to her poem " Caterina to Camoens." The theme 
of this poem is taken from Portuguese literary history, and its 
subject is several times exquisitely touched upon in the letters of 
Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett. 



10 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

she said afterward to Robert Browning. In 1854 
we find her attending "Bible meetings" and 
"church and London missionary meetings." She 
says of a sermon by Dr. Chalmers that it was 
truer to Scripture than she was prepared for, 
though there seemed to be some want on the sub- 
ject of the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart. 
She had many interviews with people who 
sought to win her to believe in some special shade 
of dogma. People were always " sending her New 
Testaments to learn from — with very kind inten- 
tions." But with a most humble spirit and an 
absolute lack of bitterness in discussion, there was 
yet in her a dogged persistence and a determined 
belief in what she did believe. She was incapable 
cf relinquishing a conclusion. Still, acrimonious 
controversy was to her detestable. Of someone 
who was coming to tear to pieces all her elaborate 
theology, she said : " If I were to see her, I would 
not argue with her; I would only ask her to let 
me love her. ... It is better to love than to con- 
vince. They who lie on the bosom of Jesus must 
lie there together." This was in 1834; in 1843 
she said again : " I may say of myself that I hope 
there is nobody in the world with a stronger will 
and aspiration to escape from sectarianism in any 
sort or sense, when I have eyes to discern it; and 
that the sectarianism of the national churches 



Life and Creed ii 

to which I do not belong, and of the dissenting 
bodies, to which I do, stand together before me on 
a pretty just level of detestation." "There may 
be sectarianism in the very cutting off of sectarian- 
ism," she thought. She was really at heart a 
dissenter — it was no mere name to her. Espe- 
cially did she take her stand strongly against empty 
ritualism. " I can never see anything in these sacra- 
mental ordinances," she said, "except a pro- 
spective sign in one (Baptism), and a memorial sign 
in the other (the Lord's Supper), and could not 
recognize either under any modification as a pe- 
culiar instrument of grace, mystery, or the like. 
The tendencies we have toward making mysteries 
of God's simplicities are as marked and sure as 
our missing the actual mystery upon occasion. 
God's love is the true mystery, and the sacraments 
are only too simple for us to understand." 

By 1845 there seems to have been a loosening 
of some of the bands of convention that had stood 
about her in earlier life. About that time we find 
her writing to her great friend, Hugh Stuart Boyd, 
words that show this change. Speaking of an old 
acquaintance who had joined the Plymouth Breth- 
ren, "Of course," she says, " has straitened 

his views since last we met, and I by the reaction 
of solitude and suffering, have broken many bands 
which held me at that time. He was always 



12 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

straiter than I, and now the diflFerence is immense. 
For I think the world wider than I once thought 
it, and I see God's love broader than I once saw 
it." Soon after this she tells Robert Browning, in 
one of those full impulses of self-revelation which 
we are so rarely privileged to read in the wonderful 
love letters, that she feels unwilling to put on any 
of the liveries of the sects. She told him that she 
cared very little for most dogmas and doxies in 
themselves, that she believed that there was only 
one church in heaven and earth, with one divine 
High Priest to it; and that therefore she hated 
from the roots of her heart all that rending of the 
garment of Christ which Christians are so apt to 
make the daily week-day of this Christianity so- 
called. But this harsher mood could not last many 
minutes in her gentle spirit. "Wherever you go, 
in all religious societies, there is a little revolt, and 
a good deal to bear with — but it is not otherwise 
in the world without; and, within, you are espe- 
cially reminded that God has to be more patient 
than yourself, after all." Then follows one of 
those illuminative passages that make the love 
letters like a sacred missal. "The truth, as God 
sees it," she says, "must be something so different 
from these opinions about truth — these systems 
which fit different classes of men like their coats, 
and wear brown at the elbows always! I believe 



Life and Creed 13 

in what is divine and floats at highest, in all these 
different theologies — and because the really Divine 
draws together souls, and tends so to a unity, I 
could pray anywhere with all sorts of worshipers, 
. . . those kneeling and those standing." 

On the other hand, she was not blind to the 
faults on the dissenting side. The formula was 
rampant among them, too; there was a narrowness 
among them which was wonderful, an " arid gray 
Puritanism in the clefts of their souls"; but it 
seemed to her clear that they knew what the 
liberty of Christ meant far better than those who 
called themselves churchmen, that they stood alto- 
gether on higher ground. She preferred, she said? 
to pray in one of ''those chapels where the minister 
was simple-minded and not controversial"; she 
liked "beyond comparison best" their ''simplicity, 
... the unwritten prayer, ... the sacraments 
administered quietly and without charlatanism! 
And the principle of a church, as they hold it, / 
hold it too, . . . quite apart from state-necessi- 
ties, . . . pure from the law." She used even a 
stronger expression: "You feel, moreover, bigotry 
and ignorance pressing on you on all sides till you 
gasp for breath like one strangled." Then with a 
touch of her usual optimism that ever will come 
buoyantly to the surface, she exclaims, "When the 
veil of the body falls, how we shall look into each 



14 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

other's faces, astonished, . . . after one glance at 
God's!" 

In "Casa Guldi Windows" — ^with this work we 
reach the year 1 851— we may consider that she is 
speaking in her own name and for herself when 
she sets down the following passage — a passage 
that may be taken as a sort of creed: 

My words are guiltless of the bigot's sense; 
My soul has fire to mingle with the fire 

Of all these souls, within or out of doors 
Of Rome's church or another. I believe 

In one Priest, and one temple with its floors 
Of shining jasper gloom'd at mom and eve 

By countless knees of earnest auditors, 
And crystal walls too lucid to perceive, 

That none may take the measure of the place 
And say, "So far the porphyry, then, the flint — 

To this mark mercy goes, and there ends grace," 
Though still the permeable crystals hint 

At some white starry distance, bathed in space. 
I feel how nature's ice-crusts keep the dint 

Of undersprings of silent Deity, 
I hold the articulated gospels which 

Show Christ among us crucified on tree. 
I love all who love truth, if poor or rich 

In what they have won of truth possessively 
No altars and no hands defiled with pitch 

Shall scare me off, but I will pray and eat 
With all these - taking leave to cho6se ray ewers — 

And say at last, "Your visible churches cheat 
Their inward types; and, if a church assures 

Of standing without failure and defeat, 
The same both fails and Hes." 

The above may be a creed; it is also an arraign- 
ment; views on this and kindred phases were the 



Life and Creed 15 

result of serious study that led to opinions definite 
and fixed. All churches share alike, however, in 
her many passages of reproof. 

What are these churches? The old temple-wall 

Doth overlook them juggling with the sleight 
Of surplice, candlestick, and altar-pall; 

East church and west church, ay, north church and south, 
Rome's church and England's,— let them all repent. 

And make concordats 'twixt their soul and mouth, 
Succeed Saint Paul by working at the tent. 

Become infallible guides by speaking truth. 
And excommunicate their pride that bent 

And cramped the souls of men. 

And in the following section she is still more posi- 
tive: 

Priests, priests, — there's no such name! - God's own, except 
Ye take most vainly. Through heaven's lifted gate 

The priestly ephod in sole glory swept 
When Christ ascended, entered in, and sate 

(With victor face sublimely overwept) 
At Deity's right hand, to mediate. 

He alone, He forever. On his breast 
The Urim and the Thummim, fed with fire 

From the full Godhead, flicker with the imrest 
Of human pitiful heart-beats. Come up higher, 

All Christians! Levi's tribe is dispossest. 
That solitary alb ye shall admire. 

But not cast lots for. The last chrism, poured right, 
Was on that Head, and poured for burial 

And not for domination in men's sight. 

This thought of "domination" is what awoke the 
greatest apprehension in the mind of the poet-seer, 
and aroused in her emotions that concentrated 
themselves in the battle-cries of her later days. 



i6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

In matters purely religious, however, the de- 
velopment of her thoughts and opinions seems to 
have been in the direction of broadening and 
charity rather than of fixedness and minute distinc- 
tions in statement of belief. It is about the time 
of the writing of **Casa Guidi Windows" that she 
is saying in a letter to an American friend : " I hold 
to Christ's invisible church as referred to in Scrip- 
ture and to the Saviour's humanity and divinity as 
they seem to me conspicuous in Scripture." And 
this is as strong a line as she seemed inclined in 
later days to make. There is no doubt that this 
direction of development began before Elizabeth 
Barrett met Robert Browning, but it is possible 
that the sympathy of her husband was a liberaliz- 
ing influence. In 1858 she was in Rome at Christ- 
mas time and was able to go to Saint Peter's to 
hear the silver trumpets — "a wonderful event for 
me," she says, and adds that she "never once 
thought of the Scarlet Lady . . . nor anything to 
spoil the pleasure," but enjoyed it both aesthetically 
and devotionally^ putting her own words to the 
music. Evidently her conscience is a little trou- 
bled at this, for she adds, ** Was it wise, or wrong ?" 

A thinker so prominent and one with so free 
and terrible a power of reproof could not escape 
detraction. She stood between those less liberal 
and those more so, owned and execrated in turn 



Life and Creed 17 

by each. She said in 1861: "I have been called 
orthodox by infidels, and heterodox by church- 
people; and gone on predicting to such persons as 
came near enough to me in speculative liberty of 
opinion to justify my speaking, that the present 
churches were in course of dissolution, and would 
have to be followed by a reconstruction of Christian 
essential verity into other than these middle-age, 
scholastic forms. Believing in Christ's divinity, 
which is the life of Christianity, I believed this. 
Otherwise, if the end were here — if we were to be 
covered over and tucked in with the Thirty-nine 
Articles or the like, and good-night to us for a 
sound sleep in 'sound doctrine' — I should fear for 
a revealed religion incapable of expansion accord- 
ing to the needs of man. What comes from God 
has life in it, and certainly from all the growth of 
living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted." 
It was not long after the writing of this that her 
pen was laid aside forever. 

By many it will be thought a misfortune to have 
been born into the strait theological inclosure that 
surrounded Elizabeth Barrett in her youth. The 
miracle was that out of this Tory coop she sprang 
an ardent and fiery liberal and republican; from 
this spiritual handicap she flamed forth a torch of 
spiritual illumination. It must be recalled that 
in that Promethean shell of illiberality could burn a 



1 8 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

fire at white heat; and from it could come many 
a light to lighten the world. Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning was, in fact, a part of the great mid- 
century movement to revivify the spiritual side of 
life. It is not more strange that she should ap- 
pear from that Wimpole Street home than that a 
spiritual war-cry should come from the mediaeval- 
ism of Oxford and that Rossetti's Mary Magdalene 
at the door of Simon with George Meredith's face 
as the model for that of the Christ, should proceed 
from the art — or no-art — of the early part of the 
century. To respiritualize life, art, poetry — New- 
man, Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — the 
three names may be placed together. Each fol- 
lov/ed the gleam that the inner soul threw upon 
the path; each looked upward and onward to a 
new revelation of life and so held forth a torch to 
the sodden and darkened but swiftly awakening 
century. 

The poetry of Mrs. Browning is not to be valued 
solely as the work of a woman in distinction from 
what it would have been had it been written by 
a man. She has perhaps spoken of some things a 
man might not have mentioned. Swinburne said 
there never was and never could be another such 
baby in type as the one in "Aurora Leigh," and 
he added that no words could ever be adequate to 
give thanks for such a gift as that. Perhaps if 



Life and Creed 19 

Mrs. Browning had written those words about 
Swinburne she would not have spoken of putting 
a "baby in type"; she would surely, however, have 
offered thanks for the fact that Swinburne has 
found time to hunt rhymes for the impossible 
rhyme "baby," and has used them so exquisitely 
in his thirty or more songs and sonnets upon the 
baby's life and loveliness, all his birthdays up to 
the ninth, his pity, laughter, battles, future, his 
footsteps, his hands and O, above all, his feet, for 
all of which many, many thanks from all the world! 
It seems, then, that the child is interesting to poets 
who are not women; it is the century of Pestalozzi 
and of Froebel; the century for setting children, 
along with other slaves, free; the time when we 
begin to see that the child is not only the father 
of the man but that he is the man. And the 
poetry of Mrs. Browning, like that of Swinburne, 
is to be read because it comes from the mind and 
heart of a complex, highly individualized person- 
ality endowed with the insight and the picturing 
power of a poet, not for any narrower reason. She 
was a great soul, and every lesser person who 
comes in contact with her spirit through what she 
has written will be uplifted and enlarged. No life, 
after a touch with hers, can ever be the same 
again, but will be something nobler and finer. 



CHAPTER II 

GOD AND THE WORLD 

The existence of a supreme First Cause and 
Creator seems never to have been a subject of 
controversy in the mind of EHzabeth Barrett 
Brov^ning. She accepted the fact of God's exist- 
ence simply, as she did that of any other person- 
aHty v^ith v^hich she came in contact. She ac- 
knowledged the rights of the intellectual doubter, 
but she looked into the face of atheism with a mild 
wonder mingled with pity. During the early years 
of Elizabeth Barrett's literary life she carried on 
an industrious correspondence with Richard Hen- 
gist Home, with whom she collaborated in certain 
literary ventures. In one of those precious and 
elaborate epistles to him she says: **You know 
Shelley, in the midst of the grand signatures of 
God, wrote at Chamouni d^sog. Poor Shelley! — 
he lied against himself, as against the Creator." 
About the same time in "A Vision of Poets" she 
was writing of Lucretius, who ** denied divinely the 
divine" and was compelled to ** teach a truth he 
would not learn." In 1840, three days before the 
death of her beloved brother, she says: ** There are 

so many mercies close around me that God's Being 

20 



God and the World 21 

seems proved to me, demonstrated to me, by His 
manifested love." And although the death of that 
brother, with the pecuHarly distressing circum- 
stances attending it, was a shock from which she 
never recovered, her faith in the goodness of God 
seems not to have wavered, as the poem "De 
Profundis" shows. 

Again, some years later (1854), as she was trying 
to comfort a friend in sorrow, she says: "You 
know how that brilliant, witty, true poet Heine, 
who was an atheist (as much as a man can pretend 
to be), has made a public profession of a change 
of opinion which was pathetic to my mind and 
heart the other day as I read it." She continues: 
"He has joined no church, but simply (to use his 
own words) has * returned home to God like the 
prodigal son after a long tending of the swine.' It 
is delightful to go home to God, even after a tend- 
ing of the sheep." So, if a man calls himself an 
atheist, it was, she believed, a mere pretense. 
Despair was blasphemy. 

By anguish which made pale the sun, 
I heard Him charge his saints that none 
Among his creatures anywhere 
Blaspheme against Him with despair, 
However darkly days go on. 

The same thought recurs in "Aurora Leigh": 

We blaspheme 
At last, to finish our doxology, 
Despairing on the earth for which He died. 



22 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

She seems to have Hved constantly in the pres- 
ence of the thought of God. He was a "manifest 
God-One" to her. He was present in every touch, 
in every breathing. His goodness was immediate. 
*'God's goodness! — I beheve in it, as in His sun- 
shine here," she cries in one of the early letters to 
Robert Browning. To her belief, God gave 
strength to support every act of life. He gave 
strength to sustain the blessings as well as the 
stripes; and without this belief she would not be 
content for a moment. The thought of the im- 
mediacy of God's presence is to her prevailingly a 
thought of joy. 

My spirit and my God shall be 
My seaward hill, my boundless sea. 

But now and then the child's "Thou God seest 
me" is not a thought of unmingled joy. In a 
most natural impulse, she cries in "An Apprehen- 
sion": Let me not unfold myself, my "motive, 
condition, means, appliances, my false ideal joy 
and fickle woe," even to the "gentlest-hearted 
friend I know." And then, in a self-accusing 
revulsion of feeling, she exclaims, 

O angels, let your flood 
Of bitter scorn da sh on me ! do ye hear 
What 1 say who bear calmly all the time 
This everlasting face to face with God? 



God and the World 23 

A vision of God! She sets it as a chrism upon 
Milton's eyes: 

Here, Milton's eyes strike piercing-dim: 
The shapes of suns and stars did swim 
Like clouds from them, and granted him 
God for sole vision ; — 

and, beyond all human longing, as the beatitude 
of the archangel, who, standing in the presence of 
the "satisfying One" and raising to God's face 

his full ecstatic gazing, 
Forgets the rush and rapture of his wings. 

In fact, the name of Deity was so often present 
in her earlier manuscripts that one editor begs her 
to write the name of God and of Jesus Christ as 
little as she can because those names do not ac- 
cord with the secular character of his journal! 
Moreover, this criticism — that she used the name 
of Deity too often — rang through review after re- 
view of the earlier works of the new woman poet 
in the years 1843-45. But it was a habit that 
could not be broken; and the letters show that it 
was the sincere expression of her type of mind. 
Scarcely one of them ends without a "God bless 
you" in the words of parting. "May God bless 
you till to-morrow and past it forever!" "May 
God bless you, give you the best blessing in earth 
and heaven as the God of the living in both 



^ 



24 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

places!" "May God bless you for both His 
worlds — not for this alone" — these are some of 
her farewells. Above all, in the love letters of the 
two Brownings, those most sincere expressions of 
the innermost soul, where God is thanked in every 
breath for the ineffable joy of the moment, it could 
hardly happen otherwise than that the name of 
God should be written upon every page. Are 
these leaves too sacred to be touched by the strange 
hand ? Yet they belong to the world now, and all 
may go there and read and know how near to the 
heart of God a human love at its highest may 
flow. At the end she says : " By to-morrow at this 
time, I shall have you only, to love me — my be- 
loved ! — You only ! As if one said God only. And 
we shall have Him beside, I pray of Him." It is 
a comfort for her sake to know that the answers 
to these letters were full of the same worshipful 
spirit and contained many passages like this: "I 
hope and believe that by your side I shall accom- 
plish something to justify God's goodness and 
yours," and like the words quoted in the opening 
chapter. 

With this conception and feeling with regard to 
the being and nearness of God, it was natural that 
she should prize all sacred subjects as lawful ma- 
terial for artistic treatment in poetry. For doing 
this she was blamed by many of the critics of her 



God and the World 25 

time. Can this be imagined to-day when the Bible 
is ransacked for themes for story, novel, and play ? 
But Mrs. Browning said: "The Christian religion 
is true or it is not, and if it is true it offers the 
highest and purest objects of contemplation. And 
the poetical faculty, which expresses the highest 
moods of the mind, passes naturally to the highest 
objects. Who can separate these things ? Did 
Dante .? Did Tasso .? Did Petrarch .? Did Cal- 
deron ? Did Chaucer .? Did the poets of our best 
British days ^ Did anyone shrink from speaking 
out Divine names when the occasion came ? 
Chaucer, with all his jubilee of spirit and resound- 
ing laughter, had the name of Jesus Christ and 
God as frequently to familiarity on his lips as a 
child has its father's name." Reading this, one 
understands her "Book of the Poets," an early 
work in prose which is not generally printed in her 
collected works but well repays the trouble of hunt- 
ing out, and also that task so fitted to her hand, 
the "Greek Christian Poets," who received a treat- 
ment from her which was tender and sympa- 
thetic. 

With one to whom the thought of God is an 
everyday presence, it might go without saying that 
the immortality of the soul would be a confirmed 
and vital belief. This belief Mrs. Browning states 
on many a page. 



26 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Love, strong as Death, shall conquer Death, 
Through struggle made more glorious, 

she cries in **A Child's Grave at Florence/' 
Again, in "Lord Walter's Wife": 

Love's a virtue for heroes! — as white as the snow on high hills, 
And immortal as every great soul is that struggles, endures, 
and fulfills. 

And that men have chosen "till death us part" 
for the symbol of the unchangeable human tie — 

Oh words to be our best — for love the deathless! — 

forces from her lips the poignant cry, " Be pitiful, 
O God ! " When writing to her friends she drops 
so easily into thoughts of the life to come. "When 
we two meet together in the new world"; "My 
ever very dear friend : you never can be other than 
just that while I live, and why not after I have 
ceased to live V^ — these are some of the phrases so 
thickly strewn through the letters. "Isobel's 
Child," an early poem, is a veritable mine of in- 
formation as to the stao-e in relig-ious belief that 

to o 

the young poet had reached in the year 1838. 
Isobel mourns the certain approach of her child's 
death; but the little one is imagined to give such 
a description of the happiness before her in heaven 
that the mother is comforted, and is satisfied to 
let her child depart. 



God and the World 27 

O small frail being, wilt thou stand 

At God's right hand, 

Lifting up those sleeping eyes 

Dilated by great destinies, 
To an endless waking? thrones and seraphim. 
Through the long ranks of their solemnities. 
Sunning thee with calm looks of Heaven's surprise, 

But thine alone on Him? 

And as the child Hes upon her lap she looks down 
upon it and is filled with the assurance that the 
"broken sentiency and conclusion incomplete" 
that she feels in the little life 

Will gather and unite and climb 
To an immortality 

Good or evil, each sublime, 
Through life and death to life again. 

The poet reproves herself for her discontent — the 
thought of our "hope beyond the zenith" should 
give us cheer; this Mrs. Browning teaches in "The 
Weakest Thing," in "Cheerfulness Taught by 
Reason," and, above all, in the sonnet "Futurity": 

And, O beloved voices, upon which 

Ours passionately call because ere long 

Ye brake off in the middle of that song 

We sang together softly, to enrich 

The poor world with the sense of love, and witch 

The heart out of things evil, — I am strong, 

Knowing ye are not lost for aye among 

The hills, with last year's thrush. God keeps a niche 

In Heaven to hold our idols; and albeit 

He brake them to our faces and denied 

That our close kisses should impair their white, 



28 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

I know we shall behold them raised, complete, 
The dust swept from their beauty, —glorified 
New Memnons singing in the great God-light. 

Who shall say how many have been comforted and 
strengthened by this triumphant poem! To Mrs. 
Browning everything proved that immortal life is 
to be the human destiny. Nothing 

shall remove 
Affections purely given ; 
And e'en that mortal grief shall prove 
The immortality of love. 

And heighten it with Heaven. 

The thought that mortal grief proves human love 
and human love proves the immortality of the soul 
was a favorite one with her, and it recurs again 
and again. It was one of her "strong opinions" 
even down to the day when in the last of her 
human letters she spoke of heaven as the "Diviner 
Country." She said: "I believe that love in its 
most human relations is an eternal thing." "Do 
not think that I think that any bond will he broken, 
or that anything will be lost. We have been fed 
on the hillside, and now there are twelve baskets 
full of fragments remaining." " How the spiritual 
world gets thronged to us with familiar faces till 
at last, perhaps, the world here will seem the 
vague and strange world, even while we re- 



main." 



To this sensitive poet, housed in a body of ex- 



God and the World 29 

tremest delicacy, the fact of death had its terrors; 
but she could look beyond. "More and more life 
is what we want/' she quoted from Tennyson in 
1858, "and that is the right want. Indifference to 
life is a disease and therefore not strength. But 
the life here is only half the apple — a cut out of 
the apple, I should say, merely meant to suggest 
the perfect round of fruit." To her beloved friend, 
Mary Russell Mitford, she wrote: "I have long 
been convinced that what we call death is a mere 
incident in life — perhaps scarcely a greater one 
than . . . the revolution which comes with any new 
emotion or influx of new knowledge." The time 
did not matter to her — the main thing being some- 
thing far more material. "Life will last as long 
as God finds it useful for myself and others — which 
is enough, both for them and me." "To live 
rightly w^e must turn our faces forward and press 
forward and not look backward morbidly for the 
footsteps in the dust of those beloved ones who 
traveled with us yesterday. They themselves are 
not behind us but before, and we carry with us our 
tenderness living and undiminished towards them, 
to be completed when the round of this life is 
complete for us also." " In our sorrow we see the 
rough side of the stuff; in our joys the smooth; and 
who shall say that when the taffeta is turned the 
most silk may not be in the sorrows?" Again, 



30 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

using a like figure, and with a little touch of her 
lambent humor, she says: "If it were not for the 
other side of the tapestry it would seem not v/orth 
while for us to stand putting in more weary Gobe- 
lin stitches (till we turn into goblins) day after day, 
year after year, in this sad world.'* Yet from her 
many years of physical disability she could win 
this wisdom: "O be sure that He means well by us 
by what we suffer, and it is when we suffer that 
He often makes the meaning clearer/' "If illness 
suppresses in us a few sources of pleasure, it leaves 
the real Ich open to influences and keen-sighted to 
facts which are as surely natural as the fly's wing, 
though we are apt to consider them vaguely as 
* supernatural.' " And through this insight she came 
to believe "how mere a line this is to overstep be- 
tween the living and the dead." 

As to the resurrection, she says in one of her 
many revelatory letters: "I am heterodox about 
sepulchers, and believe that no part of us will ever 
lie in a grave. ... I believe that the body of flesh 
is a mere husk that drops off at death, while the 
spiritual body (see St. Paul) emerges in a glori- 
ous resurrection at once. ... I believe in an active 
human life, beyond death as before it, an unin- 
terrupted human life. I believe in no waiting in 
the grave, and in no vague effluence of spirit in a 
formless vapor." Her thoughts constantly reach 



God and the World 31 

out into the beyond, and minimize the bar of death 
at the gateway of the future. 

This may be less so than appears, 
This change and separation . . . 

If God is not too great for Httle cares, 
Is any creature, because gone to God? 

The comfortable and salutary doctrine of guar- 
dian angels, so plainly taught in the Bible but so 
little regarded by the majority of evangelical teach- 
ers, seems to have been a very vivid thing to her. 
The baby-innocent of "IsobeFs Child," pleading 
with its mother to cease that " most loving cruelty" 
of her prayer that kept the child-spirit from float- 
ing away "along the happy heavenly air," says for 
plaintive argument. 

Mine angel looketh sorrowful 
Upon the face of God. 

And in the very climax of that rhapsody of sor- 
rows, the "Cry of the Children," what pierces the 
heart deepest comes when the children 

look up with their pale and stmken faces, 
And their look is dread to see, 
For they mind you of their angels in high places. 
With eyes turned on Deity. 

Our guardian angels are always seen by the poet 
with their eyes reproachfully fixed upon the face 
of God. They stand and pray for us. When 



32 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Mrs. Browning's loved friend, the blind Hugh 
Stuart Boyd, passed away she wrote : 

God has not caught thee to new hemispheres 
Because thou wast aweary of this one ; — 
I think thine angel's patience first was done, 
And that he spake out with celestial tears, 
"Is it enough, dear God? then lighten so 
This soul that smiles in darkness!" 

Again, in "The Seraphim," the hosts of angels are 
waiting in awful silence, ready to come to the 
succor of Jesus Christ in his hour of agony. Zerah, 
the angel of love, stands to see them and cries to 
a companion spirit: 

I see 

Our empyreal company, 

Alone the memory of their brightness 
Left in them, as in thee. 
The circle upon circle, tier on tier, 
Piling earth's hemisphere 

With heavenly infiniteness. 
Above us and around, 
Straining the whole horizon like a bow: 
Their songful lips divorced from all sound, 
A darkness gliding down their silver glances, — 
Bowing their steadfast solemn countenances 
As if they heard God speak, and could not glow. 

How she loves to picture them — range on range, 
pyramid on pyramid, standing up in ecstasies 
against the hyaline ! Now we see them from above 
as we stand with the two angels watching the 
seraphic flights who are commanded by God to 



God and the World 33 

fly to the help of Christ in the dark hour of the 
crucifixion ! 

Beneath us sinks the pomp angeHcal, 
Cherub and seraph, powers and virtues, all, — 

The roar of whose descent has died 
To a still sound, as thunder into rain. 

Immeasurable space spreads magnified 
With that thick life, along the plane 
The worlds slid out on. What a fall 
And eddy of wings innumerous, crossed 
By trailing curls that have not lost 
The glitter of the God-smile shed 
On every prostrate angel's head! 
What gleaming up of hands that fling 

Their homage in retorted rays, 
From high instinct of worshiping, 

And habitude of praise! 

Zerah. Rapidly they drop below us: 
Pointed palm and wing and hair 

Indistinguishable show us 
Only pulses in the air 
Throbbing with a fiery beat, 
As if a new creation heard 
Some divine and plastic word, 
And trembling at its new-found being, 

Awakened at our feet. 

Again, in "A Drama of Exile": 

The angelic hosts, the archangelic pomps, 
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, rank on rank. 
Rising sublimely to the feet of God, 
On either side and overhead the gate, 
Show like a glittering and sustained smoke 
Drawn to an apex. That their faces shine 
Betwixt the solemn clasping of their wings 
Clasped high to a silver point above their heads, — • 
We only guess from hence, and not discern. 



34 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

The mission of the guardian angel is lofty. On 
the day when Adam and Eve flew along the sword- 
glare, a company of Eden spirits — orphaned now 
that their charges were being thrust away from 
them — called after the exiles in chorus : 

Hearken, oh hearken! ye shall hearken surely 

For years and years, 
The noise beside you, dripping coldly, purely, 

Of spirits' tears. 
The yearning to a beautiful denied you 

Shall strain your powers; 
Ideal sweetnesses shall overglide you, 

Resumed from otirs. 
In all your music, our pathetic minor 

Your ears shall cross; 
And all good gifts shall mind you of diviner, 

With sense of loss. 
We shall be near you in your poet-languors 

And wild extremes. 
What time ye vex the desert with vain angers. 

Or mock with dreams. 
And when upon you, weary after roaming. 

Death's seal is put. 
By the foregone ye shall discern the coming. 

Through eyelids shut. 

Guardian angels have, too, another office. Like 
those gods of George Meredith who "by their 
great memories are known," Mrs. Browning's 
guardian angels keep a record and will at some 
future time accuse. In her " Song for the Ragged 
Schools of London" she uses this thought to in- 
tensify her plea for those 



God and the World 35 

Ragged children with bare feet, 
Whom the angels in white raiment 

Know the names of, to repeat 

When they come on you for payment. 

The fact of retribution she acknowledges fre- 
quently, but more as an argument before the act 
than as an accusation afterward. Yet Mrs. 
Browning would be the last one to want this phase 
of her thought to be slighted — she who, as she 
said, could "never regret knowledge, never would 
unknow anything, even were it the taste of the 
apples by the Dead Sea." However, though she 
felt she must admit the conventional doctrine of 
eternal punishment for sin, she seems loath to 
speak of it, or it is rather, perhaps, unnatural for 
her gentle mind to dwell very much upon that 
phase of theological teaching. In later days she 
was steadier of eye and could at some times have 
stood up beside an imprecatory psalmist. But, be- 
yond a conventional and semi-poetic allusion in 
one or two places, she makes little reference to the 
Evil One. To be sure, there is Lucifer in the 
"Drama of Exile"; he is to be thought of as a 
character in a work of the imagination; he belongs 
in a group of literary devils among whom Mrs. 
Browning in the "Book of the Poets" classed that 
"grand luxurious melancholy devil" of Marlowe, 
and " Goethe's subtle biting Voltairish devil — each 
being devil after its kind." We might mention in 



36 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

this connection the aristocratic prince of lost spirits 

of the "Paradise Lost"; if Milton's Satan is the 

Byron of literary devils, Mrs. Browning's Lucifer 

is the Shelley in that company. This is the way 

Lucifer is introduced to us. Gabriel says to him : 

"x\ngel of the sin, 
Such as thou standest, — pale in the drear light 
Which rounds the rebel's work with Maker's wrath, — 
Thou shalt be an Idea to all souls, 
A monumental melancholy gloom 
Seen down all ages, whence to mark despair 
And measure out the distances from good." 

Lucifer's meanness repels us at first, and on the 
wavering line between scorn and pity we balance 
delicately; but there is a white heat sweeping down 
the lines where he hurls his last curse after the 
departing Adam and Eve, that gives a picture of 
the veritable meaning of hell unequaled in litera- 
ture. Lucifer, now 

The outcast and the mildew of things good, 
The leper of angels, 

looks back to the angel that he was, created good 
and fair, and then begs Adam and Eve to rejoice 
because they do not know a "fire-hate" such as 
harbors in his breast, a "potential hate" 

Wherein I, angel, in antagonism 

To God and his reflex beatitudes, 

Moan ever, in the central universe, 

With the great woe of striving against Love 

And gasp for space amid the Infinite, 

And toss for rest amid the Desertness, 



God and the World 37 

Self-orphaned by my will, and self-elect 
To kingship of resistant agony 

Toward the Good around me — hating good and love, 
And willing to hate good and to hate love, 
And willing to will on so evermore, 
Scorning the past and damning the to-come — 
Go and rejoice! I curse you. 

And when the last "ah, ah, Heosphoros" has 

faded down the mists, and all the "piteous pomp 

at morn and even and melancholy leaning out of 

heaven" have passed, we have no compunctious 

visitings as we go to join the company of poor 

Rabbie Burns and are "wae to think upo' yon den 

e'en for his sake." 

When she comes to consider the future estate of 

the eternally lost her loving nature will hardly let 

her name the name. Again a quotation from 

"IsobeFs Child" must be taken. The mother 

holds upon her lap the child whom she supposes 

to be asleep, and reflects upon the possibility that 

its soul may "self-willed" go 

to tread the Godless place, 
(God keep thy will!) feel thine energies 
Cold, strong, objectless, like a dead man's clasp, 
The sleepless, deathless life within thee grasp, — 
While myriad faces, like one changeless face, 
With woe not love's, shall glass thee everyrvhere 
And overcome thee with thine own despair. 

"Woe not love's"! It was as far as her gentle 
touch could go. 

Yet she fully believed in the doctrine of original 



38 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

sin, as many passages in the earlier poems show, and 
down to the latest she at any rate did not overcome 
the habit of reflecting upon the trail of Adamic 
influence upon the race. Pardon is asked for the 
"woe mine Adam sent" in "The Poet's Vow"; and 
again, referring to Isobel's child, the mother says: 

A solemn thing it is to me 

To look upon a babe that sleeps 

Wearing in its spirit-deeps 
The undeveloped mystery 

Of our Adam's taint and woe. 
Which, when they developed be, 

Will not let it slumber so. 

In "Earth and Her Praisers" she speaks of the 

"ancient curse" upon earth; one of the greatest 

sections of the "Drama of Exile" is based upon 

the same idea, and in "The Virgin Mary to the 

Child Jesus" she makes this use of the doctrine. 

Mary says: 

So, seeing my corruption, can I see 

This Incorruptible now bom of me. 

This fair new Innocence no sun did chance 

To shine on, (for even Adam was no child,) 

Created from my nature all defiled, 

This mystery, from out mine ignorance, — 

Nor feel the blindness, stain corruption more 

Than others do, or / did heretofore? 

Can hands wherein such burden pure has been, 

Not open with the cry "unclean, unclean," 

More oft than any else beneath the skies? 

Ah King, ah Christ, ah Son! 
The kine, the shepherds, the abased wise 

Must all less lowly wait 

Than I, upon thy state. 



God and the World 39 

And yet she believed in the divinity that harbors 
in every human being. 

God's image cannot shine 
Where sin's funereal darkness lowers. 

The sting of death is sin; the "griefs that are in- 
curable are those that have our own sins festering 
in them"; yet, 

O thou that sinnest, grace doth more abound 
Than all thy sin! sit still beneath My rood, 
And count the droppings of My victim-blood, 
And seek none other sound! 

She reaches the biblical and philosophical instruc- 
tion upon repentance; honors to the mighty dead 

^r^ best supplied 

By bringing actions to prove theirs not vain. 

Yet she came to think that, however marred, we 
cannot do without our past. In the first part of 
"Casa Guidi Windows," written in 1848, we find 
a wonderful passage that shows a step in advance. 
There's room, she says in effect, for the weakest 
man alive to live and die, and for the strong to 
live well, too; then let the living live, and the dead 
"retain their grave-cold flowers." After a mo- 
ment she picks up the thought and weaves it over 
into something better still: 

Cold graves, we say? it shall be testified 
That living men who bum in heart and brain, 

Without the dead were colder. If we tried 
To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure 

The future would not stand. 



40 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

This thought she turns over in the light of several 
illuminating figures, and then continues: 

Who dared build temples, without tombs in sight? 

Or live, without some dead man's benison? 
Or seek truth, hope for good, and strive for right, 

If, looking up, he saw not in the sun 
Some angel of the martyrs all day long 

Standing and waiting? . . . 

If orphaned, we are disinherited. 

As she proceeds to greater maturity she takes into 
her thought the 

poor blind souls 
That writhe toward heaven along the devil's trail. 

'Tis written in the Book 
He heareth the young ravens when they cry, 
And yet they cry for carrion. — O my God, 
And we, who make excuses for the rest, 
We do it in our measure. Then I knelt. 
And dropped my head upon the pavement too, 
And prayed, since I was foolish in desire 
Like other creatures, craving oifal-food, 
That He would stop his ears to what I said, 
And only listen to the run and beat 
Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood — 

And then 
I lay, and spoke not: but He heard in heaven. 

Mrs. Browning does not say much about prayer 
— it is not necessary, for a large part of the poems 
by her are prayer itself. Still, now and then an 
academic touch in the letters gives a hint that she 
has allowed her mind to dwell upon the abstract 



God and the World 41 

questions that hedge about the self-conscious in- 
tellectual problems of prayer. Fanaticism, she 
says, depends on the defect of intellect rather than 
on an excess of the adoring faculty. The latter 
cannot be too fully developed. 

"Sleep late," I said? — 

Why, now, indeed, they sleep. 
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, 
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, 
A gauntlet with a gift in't. Every wish 
Is like a prayer, with God. 

Was prayer a mystery to her ? She referred it to 
the request of God — together with other mysteries 
she despaired of fathoming. "God's will" is the 
only answer to the mystery of the world's afflic- 
tions, she said; and in another place she enlarges 
the circle of this thought a little more: "God's 
wisdom, deeply steeped in His love, is as far as we 
can stretch out our hands." She talks glibly of the 
" portion of earthly happiness not irremediably lost 
to me by the Divine decree," as if the divine de- 
cree had no terrors for her. In "The Lay of the 
Brown Rosary" she touches the doctrine of pre- 
destination, and in "The Seraphim" the second 
angel refuses to let the first angel approach be- 
cause it is "not willed" that he should do so. In 
another breath she is letting Christ answer to the 
Spirits of the Earth who (in the **Drama of Exile") 
have been scoffing at Adam and Eve, 



42 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Which of you disdains 
These sinners who in falling proved their height 
Above you by their liberty to fall? 

And it must be admitted that she has very good 
example in putting the two aspects of truth side 
by side! As she would herself have said at this 
point, see Saint Paul! Yet she says: "I don't 
call myself a Calvinist. I hang suspended be- 
tween the two doctrines, and hide my eyes in God's 
love from the sights that other people say they see. 
I believe simply that the saved are saved by grace, 
and that they shall hereafter know it fully; and 
that the lost are lost by their choice and free will 
— by choosing to sin and die; and I believe abso- 
lutely that the deepest damned of all the lost will 
not dare to whisper to the nearest devil that re- 
proach of Martha, 'If the Lord had been near me, 
I had not died. ' But of the means of the working 
of God's grace, and of the time of the formation of 
the Divine counsels, I know nothing, guess nothing, 
and struggle to guess nothing; and my persuasion 
is that when people talk of what was ordained or 
approved by God before the foundation of the 
world, their tendency is almost always toward a 
confusion of His eternal nature with the human 
conditions of ours; and to an oblivion of the fact 
that with Him there can be no after nor before." 
The pages of discussion of Paul's meaning in Rom. 



God and the World 43 

8. 29, which follow this quotation from a letter to 
the Greek scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, would be 
interesting to theologians. But the spirit in which 
she took refuge from the mazes of argument is 
shown in the following stanzas from "De Pro- 
fundis," that very rapture of renunciation to God's 
will: 

For us, — whatever's undergone, 
Thou knowest, wiliest what is done. 
Grief may be joy misunderstood; 
Only the Good discerns the good. 
I trust Thee while my days go on. 

Whatever' s lost, it first was won; 

We will not struggle nor impugn. 

Perhaps the cup was broken here, 

That Heaven's new wine might show more clear. 

I praise Thee while my days go on. 

I praise Thee while my days go on; 

I love Thee while my days go on ; 

Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, 

With emptied arms and treasure lost, 

I thank Thee while my days go on : 

On the whole, the view of life that Mrs. Brown- 
ing entertains is an optimistic one : 

Our only tears shall serve to prove 
Excess in pleasure or in love; 

and we are made to find this true when we refer 
all things to heavenly standards. 

What's the best thing in the world? 
— Something out of it, I think. 



44 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

The "Rhapsody of Life's Progress" is a very 
paean of triumph over all possible forms of anguish 
and trouble : 

I am strong in the spirit, — deep-thoughted, clear-eyed, — 
I coiild walk, step for step, with an angel beside, 
On the heaven-heights of truth. 

On, chariot! on, soul! 

Ye are all the more fleet — 

Be alone at the goal 

Of the strange and the sweet ! 

Love us, God! love us, man! we believe, we achieve: 
Let us love, let us live, 
For the acts correspond : 
We are glorious, and die: 
And again on the knee of a mild Mystery 
That smiles with a change, 
Here we lie. 
O Death, O Beyond, 
Thou art sweet, thou art strange 

Very much the same thoughts are expressed in a 
letter to Robert Browning: "You are not to think 
— ^whatever I may have written or implied — that I 
lean either to the philosophy or affectation which 
beholds the world through darkness instead of 
light, and speaks of it wailingly. Now, may God 
forbid that it should be so with me. I am not 
desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter 
mental discipline and long bodily seclusion I come 
out with two learnt lessons . . . — the wisdom of 
cheerfulness and the duty of social intercourse. 
Anguish has instructed me in joy and solitude in 



God and the World 45 

society. . . . And altogether, I may say that the 
earth looks the brighter to me in proportion to my 
own deprivations. The laburnum trees and rose 
trees are plucked up by the roots — but the sun- 
shine is in their places, and the root of the sunshine 
is above the storms. What we call Life is a con- 
dition of the soul, and the soul must improve in 
happiness and in wisdom, except by its own fault. 
These tears in our eyes, these faintings of the 
flesh, will not hinder such improvement." 

Another rhapsody of life's progress — although 
not under that name — may be read at the closing 
of the last book of "Aurora Leigh." The keynote 
is, "He shall make all new." But, until the time 
when these radiant prophecies may be fulfilled, we 
must fit the things of earth to the standards of 
heaven as well as we may. We get knowledge by 
losing what w^e hoped for, and liberty by losing 
what we loved. "This world is a fragment — or, 
rather, a segment — and it will be rounded pres- 
ently, to the completer satisfaction. Not to doubt 
that is the greatest blessing it gives now. Death is 
as vain as life; the common impression of it, as 
false and absurd. A mere change of circum- 
stances. What more .? And how near those spirits 
are, how conscious, how full of active energy and 
tender reminiscence and interest, who shall dare 
to doubt ? For myself, I do not doubt at all." 



CHAPTER III 

THE REALMS OF MYSTICISM 

"I AM," said Mrs. Browning, in a beautiful 
letter written to Raskin in 1859, "what many peo- 
ple call a ' mystic,' but what I myself call a ' realist,' 
because I consider that every step of the foot or 
stroke of the pen here has some real connection 
with and result in the hereafter" — ^which shows 
that whatever else she was there was no touch of 
the doctrinaire in her. She uses words to suit 
herself — poetically and not technically. But it does 
not prove that she had not thought the theorems 
of theology through to the last issue, shirking 
nothing. She enters into discussion with her 
friend the blind Greek scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd; 
she goes through the Greek of the Epistle to the 
Romans to trace out the meanings of npoyiyvc^aneiv^ 
(though she may not have noticed the accents!) 
and she takes a decided position for herself in the 
stormy controversy about "foreknow" and "pub- 
licly favor." She attended Bible meetings where, 
as we are given to understand, discussion raged, 
and she was the subject of much missionary en- 

iJn Rom. 8. 29. 

46 



The Realms of Mysticism 47 

deavor on the part of ardent believers in this or 
that delicate shade of theological statement. 
Through all she showed a thoroughly sweet but 
unbending intellectual independence and a loyalty 
to her own mind which was ever the absolute 
necessity to her soul's peace. 

Mrs. Browning was inclined toward a mystical 
conception because she had so intense a feeling of 
God's presence about her. 

Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west — 

And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our in- 
completeness, — ■ 

Round our restlessness. His rest. 

But it was far more than a mere sense of rest that 
she felt in relying on the infinite power of God. 
It was something more real, more tangible, more 
personal. It must be that she had this clear reali- 
zation of the Being of God from her earliest days. 
Her memories of childhood thoughts and experi- 
ences found here and there throughout her works 
seem to show her belief that the young soul, the 
new, unvitiated soul, has avenues connecting it 
with divine realms that in later years worldliness 
may clog or sin may seal. The passage in " Aurora 
Leigh " where Aurora recalls the playmates of her 
childhood, the Italian lizards, among whom she 
"sat equally in fellowship and mateship," as a 



48 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

child may, " before the Adam in him has foregone 
all privilege of Eden," illustrates this. Before 
"the Adam" in us, then, has lost all sense of 
Eden we may know the presence of God in 
close nearness to us on every side. There is a 
sense of God in the mind of every child, she 
thought, as Wordsworth, in the great "Ode on 
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections 
of Childhood," has shown that he also be- 
lieved. And that the instinctive aspiration of the 
child's mind should not be met with silence and 
vacancy in the mind of the teacher, she declares 
with a vehemence and a penetration wanting in 
the educationalists of her time. When Marian 
Erie is relating the pathetic tale of her life, she 
tells how at three she, a "poor weaned kid," 
would 



run off from the fold, 
This babe would steal off from the mother's chair, 
And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse, 
Would find some keyhole toward the secrecy 
Of Heaven's high blue, and, nestling down, peer out — 
Oh, not to catch the angels at their games, — 
She had never heard of angels, but to gaze 
She knew not why, to see she knew not what, 
A-htingering outward from the barren earth 
For something like a joy. She liked, she said, 
To dazzle black her sight against the sky, 
For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down, 
And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss; 
She learnt God that way. . . , 



The Realms of Mysticism 49 

This grand blind Love, she said, 
This skyey father and mother both in one, 
Instructed her and civiHzed her more 
Than even Sunday school did afterward. 
To which a lady sent her to learn books 
And sit upon a long bench in a row 
With other children. 

But her keen sense of the nearness of the spiritual 
world was more than a memory of childhood to 
Mrs. Browning. Like the young Rossetti and 
others of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood, her mind 
was of the eager, questioning order, given to find- 
ing symbolisms in everything in human life and in 
the universe; the kind of mind that looked through 
every symbol to a meaning beyond and to which 
every symbol was as a telescope to bring spiritual 
meanings within reach of human ken. An Oriental 
legend with all its soft sensuousness, when her hand 
touches it, is illumined with spiritual symbolism. 
There is no mistaking the Dove in "IsobeFs 
Child" — ^whose 

love-large eye 
Looked upon me mystic calms, 

Till the power of his divine 

Vision was indrawn to mine. 

When she looked within her own soul she felt the 
strange movement of forces that she could only 
explain by relating them to the supernatural. 
"You have divine insights," she said to one cor- 
respondent, "as we all have, of heaven, all of us 



50 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

with whom the mortal mind does not cake and 
obstruct into cecity." And it was one of her won- 
derfully illuminating strokes of analysis when she 
said, in "Aurora Leigh/' 

How sure it is, 
That, if we say a true word, instantly 
We feel 'tis God's, not ours, and pass it on 
Like bread at sacrament we taste and pass 
Nor handle for a moment, as indeed 
We dared to set up any claim to such! 

In "The Seraphim" the loving angel Zerah says, 

His will is as a spirit within my spirit, 
A portion of the being I inherit. 
His will is mine obedience. 

The thought of the mystic union of God and the 
believer in Christ finds expression in one of those 
almost ecstatic Hymns in the volume of 1838. It 
is Hymn i, and is called "A Supplication for 
Love"; the last stanza begins with the prayerful 

lines. 

Oh, move us — ^Thou hast power to move — 
One in the one Beloved to be!— 

and was no doubt an expression of her own per- 
sonal feeling, for it harbors that passionate desire 
to "right" her "nature" in deep calms of space, 
then "shoot large sail on lengthening cord, and 
rush exultant on the Infinite," which finds expres- 
sion again in a lovely sonnet called "Finite and 
Infinite." In these dim feelings she is often ver- 



The Realms of Mysticism 51 

ging upon a mystical conception of the universe. 
In the poem called "Sounds" we find this: 

Hearken, hearken! 

God speaketh to thy soul, 
Using the supreme voice which doth confound 
All life with consciousness of Deity, 

All senses into one, — 
As the seer-saint of Patmos, loving John 

(For whom did backward roll 
The cloud-gate of the future), turned to see 
The Voice which spake. It speaketh now, 
Through the regular breath of the calm creation. 
Through the moan of the creature's desolation 
Striking, and in its stroke resembling 
The memory of a solemn vow 
Which pierceth the din of a festival 
To one in the midst, — and he letteth fall 
The cup with a sudden trembling. 

As she sees it in "A Rhapsody of Life's Progress," 
we are moving along the "inward ascensions" of 
our "sensual relations and social conventions," 

Yet are 'ware of a sight, yet are 'ware of a sound 
Beyond Hearing and Seeing, — 

Are aware that a Hades rolls deep on all sides 
With its infinite tides 

About and above us,— 

the word "Hades" being here evidently used in 
the classic meaning of a dim underworld of spirits, 
but exalted in her thought to an all-inclosing over- 
world of spiritual essence which, if we were but 
attuned harmoniously, we could by reaching out in 
any direction, touch to its finer issues and enjoy, 



52 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

until the strong arch 
Of our life creaks and bends as if ready for falling, 
And through the dim rolling we hear the sweet calling 
Of spirits that speak in a soft undertongue 
The sense of the mystical march: — 

this thought the poet touches timidly, with a sort 
of tremulous joy. Then she calls into that world 
of spiritual effluence and asks the angels to come 
nearer, to speak clearer, and teach her the song 
that they sing. But whether they answer or not 
she will smile in her thoughts. 

For to dream of a sweetness is sweet as to know. 

In "Human Life's Mystery'* she touches the 
lowest degree in a discouraged mood; while 
in "A Child's Thought of God" lies the an- 
swer — the only one there is — "I feel that His 
embrace slides down by thrills through all things 
made." 

And, in the tumult and excess 

Of act and passion tinder sun, 
We sometimes hear — oh, soft and far, 
As silver star did touch with star. 
The kiss of Peace and Righteousness 

Through all things that are done. 

God keeps his holy mysteries 

Just on the outside of man's dream; 
In diapason slow, we think 
To hear their pinions rise and sink, 
While they float pure beneath his eyes. 
Like swans adown a stream. 



The Realms of Mysticism 53 

Abstractions, are they, from the forms 
Of his great beauty? — exaltations 

From his great glory? — strong previsions 

Of what we shall be? —intuitions 

Of what we are— in calms and storms 
Beyond our peace and passions ? 

Things nameless! which, in passing so, 
Do stroke us with a subtle grace; 

We say, "Who passes?" -they are dumb; 

We cannot see them go or come, 

Their touches fall soft, cold, as snow 
Upon a blind man's face. 

Yet, touching so, they draw above 

Our common thoughts to Heaven's unknown; 

Our daily joy and pain advance 

To a divine significance 

Our human love— O mortal love, 
That light is not its own! 

Her all-abandoning resignation to the will of 
God did not keep her from a passionate outreach- 
ing of the mind to know more of the working of 
God's creative energy in the universe, especially in 
the borderlands that were then spreading and 
widening in every direction. It must be remem- 
bered how many of these boundaries, then shroud- 
ed in the mists of ignorance and therefore of dis- 
trust, have since been to some extent charted. 
Mrs. Browning was possessed of the same divine 
curiosity that has led so many explorers into those 
dangerous regions, characterized in the minds of 
the pious folk of that time as full of the quick- 



54 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

sands of ill fame and fluttered over with the ignis 
fatuus of insincerity. Yet scientific men have 
braved these Hmbos, and so rescued the exploring 
bands from the sting of disrepute. They have also 
rid the new countries of much of the charlatanry 
that had at once crowded into the ranks; and her 
name with theirs must have honor for the spirit 
in which she thought and spoke — perhaps we may 
not say studied, for the investigations can hardly 
have reached the stage of systematic study in the 
day of the early experiences of Elizabeth Barrett. 

These alluring borderlands had several distinct 
regions. There was mesmerism with attendant 
phrenology, crystal ball prophesying, and clair- 
voyance paid and unpaid; there was Swedenbor- 
gianism with many long books for her to read 
alongside of her Balzac and Sacchetti; and there 
was spiritualism. 

In the early days of the excitement about mes- 
merism (that is, about 1845) ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ greatest 
interest in the discussions. She first knew of its 
use in connection with the sickness of her friend 
Miss Harriet Martineau. Not only was Miss 
Martineau herself cured by means of mesmeric 
trances, but also she had an "apocalyptic house- 
maid (save the mark!)", as Mrs. Browning says, 
who, being clairvoyante, prophesied concerning the 
anatomical structure of herself and others, and 



The Realms of Mysticism 55 

declared " awful spiritual dicta" concerning the soul 
and the mind and their destination. Miss Barrett 
came to believe in this mysterious force as an 
agency, but she refused to permit its use in her 
own case. In a letter to Mr. Home she said: "I 
am credulous and superstitious, naturally, and find 
no difficulty in the wonder; only precisely because 
I believe it, I would not subject myself to this 
mystery at the will of another, and this induction 
into things unseen. ... Is it lawful — or, if lawful, 
expedient .? Do you believe a word of it, or are 
you skeptical ?" With another friend, Mrs. Jame- 
son, she viewed it with horror. If there was any- 
thing in it, they said to each other, there was so 
much that it became scarcely possible to limit con- 
sequences, and the subject grew awful to contem- 
plate. To this friend she wrote: "And now I do 
not like to send you this letter without telling you 
my impression about mesmerism, lest I seem re- 
served and 'afraid of committing myself,' as 
prudent people are. I will confess, then, that my 
impression is in favor of the reality of mesmerism 
to some unknown extent. I particularly dislike 
believing it, I would rather believe most other 
things in the world; but the evidence of the 'cloud 
of witnesses' does thunder and lightning so in my 
ears and eyes, that I believe, while my blood runs 
cold. I would not be practiced upon — no, not for 



56 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

one of Flushie's* ears, and I hate the whole theory. 
It is hideous to my imagination, especially what is 
called phrenological mesmerism. After all, truth 
is to be accepted; and testimony, when so various 
and decisive, is an ascertainer of truth." To an- 
other literary friend she wrote: *'I do lean to 
believing this class of mysteries, and I see nothing 
more incredible in the marvels of clairvoyance than 
in that singular adaptation of another person's 
senses which is a common phenomenon of the sim- 
ple forms of mesmerism. If it is credible that a 
person in a mesmeric sleep can taste the sourness of 
the vinegar on another person's palate, I am ready to 
go the whole length of the transmigration of senses." 
And yet, she said, it made her blood run back- 
ward, and she would not allow her sister to send 
a lock of her hair to a Parisian prophet to get an 
oracle therefrom concerning the fate in store for 
her! No! If she had yielded she would have felt 
the steps of pale spirits treading thick as snow all 
over her sofa and bed, and pulling a corresponding 
lock of hair on her head at awful intervals ! 

A characteristic touch of mysticism comes out in 
another letter to the same friend. Is one not, 
she asks, to hold an opinion as a thinking being 
the grounds of which one cannot as yet justify to 

i"Flush" is the name of the famous dog given to Elizabeth Bar- 
rett by Mary Russell Mitford. 



The Realms of Mysticism 57 

the world ? Have we not opinions beyond what 
we can prove to others ? And because some of the 
Hnks of the outer chain of logical argument fail, 
are we therefore to have our honors questioned 
because we do not yield what is suspended to an 
inner uninjured chain of at once subtler and 
stronger formation ? To make a moral obligation 
of an intellectual act, is not this the first step and 
gesture in all persecution for opinion ? 

But however much she may have thought upon 
this subject, and however eagerly she may have 
desired certain knowledge, it seems not to have 
invaded the realm where the spirits o£ song reside. 
Mr. Browning used the themes suggested by mes- 
merism almost voluminously, but Mrs. Browning 
not definitely once. 

To the voluminous literature of Swedenborgian- 
ism she brought the same detached, judicial frame 
of mind. Long before she knew the name of 
Swedenborg, she had thought out for herself some 
of the same ideas that he stated; as, for example, 
that some persons do not, immediately after death, 
realize that they have passed into a superearthly 
state; and when accused of a Swedenborgian ten- 
dency in her writings, she affirms earnestly and 
repeatedly that she has written most of her poems 
before she had read any of that mystic's writ- 
ings. But the writings interested her. In 1853 



58 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

she speaks of "making frocks for her child, read- 
ing Proudhon (and Swedenborg) and in deep 
meditation on the rapping spirits." In 1859 she 
has difficulty in getting books (she is in Rome); 
she gets what she can, and "stops up the chinks 
with Swedenborg." Again she said, in 1861: "I 
don't beHeve in any such thing as arbitrary re- 
wards and punishments, but in consequences and 
logical results. That seems to me God's way of 
working. The scriptural phrases are simply sym- 
bolical and Swedenborg helps you past the sym- 
bol." 

Again in a letter to Ruskin she says: "I be- 
lieve in a perpetual sequence (in rewards and 
punishments) and a correspondence between the 
natural world and the spiritual." This is perhaps 
more like a transference of Swedenborgian thought 
than anything else to be found in her writings, but 
there are many similar expressions to be found in 
her earliest works. It may be that some reflection 
of these thoughts will be found in the following 
passage in Book V of "Aurora Leigh," a poem 
finished in 1856: 

There's not a flower of spring 
That dies ere June but vaunts itself allied 
By issue and symbol, by significance 
And correspondence, to that spirit- world 
Outside the limits of our space and time. 
Whereto we are boimd. 



The Realms of Mysticism 59 

Or in this from Book VIII: 

And verily many thinkers of this age, 

Ay, many Christian, teachers, half in heaven, 

Are wrong in just my sense who understood 

Our natural world too insularly, as if 

No spiritual counterpart completed it, 

Consummating its meaning, rounding all 

To justice and perfection, line by line, 

Form by form, nothing single nor alone, 

The great below clenched by the great above, 

Shade here authenticating substance there. 

The body proving spirit, as the effect 

The cause : we meantime being too grossly apt 

To hold the natural, as dogs a bone 

(Though reason and nature beat us in the face), 

So obstinately that we'll break our teeth 

Or ever we let go. 

Perhaps the impressions made upon her by 
those forerunners of a spiritistic movement, mes- 
merism, Swedenborgianism, and kindred isms that 
forced themselves upon her attention, prepared her 
mind to give more serious thought to the often 
undignified phenomena of spirit-rapping than she 
v^ould have given without thos^ predisposing in- 
fluences. Always following with most earnest gaze 
"the loosening of the soul to the end of its tether 
while it runs into the spiritual world and returns 
again to this," there was yet in her a power of skep- 
ticism which sometimes "grew through Hume's 
process of doubtful doubts," as she said, "and at 
last rose to the full stature of incredulity." This 
attitude of question and balance in intellectual 



6o Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

matters was with her from first to last in her re- 
lations with people who were interested in the 
spiritistic investigations. It was a wonderful com- 
bination — that intense eagerness like a white flame, 
that implacable loyalty to the soul's belief of the 
moment at the stage of progress attained, that pas- 
sion of poet and seer, that intelligent self-restraint 
that held all in control and waited — it is a picture 
of a soul's drama that has perhaps never been so 
laid bare to us as it has here. 

In 1852 the word "hypnotism" had not been 
echoed and reechoed around the world as it has 
since, but the wonder-working crystal ball had 
been bought from an Egyptian magician and had 
been imported into the English drawing-room. 
Mrs. Browning, visiting in England, went to "meet 
it and the seer" and, she said, endured both lun- 
cheon and spiritual phenomena with great equa- 
nimity. It was, she thought, very curious as a sign 
of the times; but " I love the marvelous," she added, 
as some sort of apology for her fanciful interest in 
the subject. Afterward she complained whimsic- 
ally of the skepticism of certain leading people, 
among others of Charles Dickens : " Dickens, too, 
so fond of ghost stories as long as they are im- 
possible!" On her return to Florence she writes 
to Mrs. Jameson: "We have been meditating so- 
cialism and mysticism of various kinds, deep in 



The Realms of Mysticism 6i 

Louis Blanc and Proudhon, deeper in the German 
spiritualists, added to which, I have by no means 
given up my French novels and my rapping spirits, 
of w^hom our American guests bring us relays of 
witnesses." There are, she hears, a matter of 
fifteen thousand mediums in America; and soon 
after, the American rapping spirits are imported 
to "great satisfaction." Now all Italy, all Europe 
are swept by the strange new doctrine, or rather 
frenzy. In Florence all classes of people are in- 
terested; tipping tables are everywhere; from the 
priest to the Mazzinian, people are making circles; 
from the Legation to the English chemists, they 
are serving tables (in spite of the Apostle) every- 
where. An engraving of a spinning table at a 
shop window bears this motto of Galileo: "E pur 
si muove!" On the terrace at Bellosguardo the 
Brownings sat with a group of friends; they ate 
strawberries and cream and talked spiritualism un- 
til the fireflies came and Florence was dissolved 
away into the purple of the hills. "Profane or 
not," said Mrs. Browning, "I am resolved on get- 
ting as near to a solution of the spirit question as 
I can, and I don't believe in the least risk of pro- 
fanity, seeing that whatever is, must be permitted; 
and that the contemplation of whatever is must be 
permitted also, where the intentions are pure and 
reverent. I can discern no more danger in psy- 



62 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

chology than in mineralogy, only intensely a greater 
interest. As to the spirits, I care less about what 
they are capable of communicating than of the fact 
of their being communications. I certainly wouldn't 
set about building a system of theology out of 
their oracles. God forbid!" Four years later she 
shows the same balanced restraint. "I could 
never consent to receive my theology — or any 
species of guidance, in fact — from the ' spirits,' so 
called. I have no more confidence, apart from 
my own conscience and discretionary selection, in 
spirits out of the body, than in those embodied. 
The submission of the whole mind and judgment 
carries you in either case to the pope — or to the 
devil." 

But she did believe that the widespread mani- 
festations showed that the world was on the verge 
of great developments of our spiritual nature, on 
the verge of discovering a new law — or a new 
development of law. "As to the supernatural," 
she wrote, " if you mean by that the miraculous, 
the suspension of natural law, I certainly believe 
in it no more than you do. What happens, hap- 
pens according to a natural law, the development 
of which only becomes fuller and more observable." 
It was this thought and this belief that lent her 
stability and peace in spite of the eager and wist- 
ful outreaching of her soul in every direction for 



The Realms of Mysticism 63 

news of the spirit world. Fair investigation was 
all her desire. In a spirited letter to an opposer 
she cried : " You would have us snowed upon with 
poppies till we sleep and forget these things. I, 
on the contrary, would have our eyes wide open, 
our senses all attentive, our souls lifted in reveren- 
tial expectation. Every fact is a word of God, and 
I call it irreligious to say, * I will deny this because 
it displeases me,' *I will look away from that be- 
cause it will do me harm.' Why be afraid of the 
truth ? God is in the truth and He is called also 
Love." She held every fact to be a footstep of 
Deity; we should pick up every rough, ungainly 
stone of a fact even though it were likely to tear 
the smooth wallet of theory. To the objection that 
the messages received were inconsequent and un- 
dignified, she was ready with characteristic answer. 
"Why are our communications chiefly trivial? 
Why, but because we ourselves are trivial, and don't 
bring serious souls and concentrated attentions and 
holy aspirations to the spirits who are waiting for 
these things .? . . . We try experiments from curi- 
osity, just as children play with the loadstone; our 
ducks swim, but they don't get beyond that, and 
wont, unless we do better." 

The problem "whether the intelligence is ex- 
ternal or whether it may not be an unconscious 
projection in the medium of a second personality 



64 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

accompanied by clairvoyance and attended by 
physical manifestations," was a knotty question to 
her, as it remains to all students of the super- 
natural to this day. In spite of this and other 
unanswered questions, it seems that she did by 
the year 1858 reach a place where she could in a 
moment of triumphant faith make a declaration 
like this : " There is in the world now, I can testify 
to you, scientific proof that what we call death is a 
mere change of circumstances, a change of dress, a 
mere breaking of the outside shell and husk. . . . 
In twenty years the probability is that you will have 
no more doubters of the immortality of souls, and 
no more need of Platos to prove it." That this 
was the vision of the poet rather than the cer- 
tainty of the reasoner, we need not say. Her faith 
based upon revealed religion made her leap quickly 
over to a belief based on a scientific proof which 
had not as yet been set on sure foundations. She 
did not think that it would be, could be, so long 
before all the problems would be solved. That 
this did not immediately come about was, of 
course, a source of the most poignant disappoint- 
ment to her. In a letter to a friend she said: 
" Some of us have sat hour after hour in solitudes 
and silences God has made for us, listening to the 
inner life, questioning the depths and heights; yet 
the table did not tremble and tilt, and we had no 



The Realms of Mysticism 65 

involuntary answers from the deeps of the soul, in 
raps or mystical sighs or bell-like sounds against 
the window." Again, in one of her latest letters, 
she says sadly: "The teachings of spiritualism are 
like those in the world. There are excellent things 
taught, and iniquitous things taught. Only the 
sublime communications are, as far as I know, 
decidedly absent." About the same time she 
speaks again more fully; and this was in the very 
winter before that "incident of death" occurred in 
the midst of her own immortal life. She was 
writing from Rome to Miss Haworth in January, 
1 86 1, and says: "As far as I am concerned I never 
heard or read a single communication which im- 
pressed me in the least: what does impress me is 
the probability of their being communications at 
all. . . . What are these intelligencies, separated 
yet related and communicating? What is their 
state ? what their aspiration ? have we had part or 
shall we have part with them ? is this the corollary 
of man's life on earth ? or are they unconscious 
echoes of his embodied soul ? That anyone should 
admit a fact (such as a man being lifted into the 
air, for instance) and not be interested in it, is so 
foreign to the habits of my mind (which can't 
insulate a fact from an inference, and rest there) 
that I have not a word to say. Only I see that if 
this class of facts, however grotesque, be recog- 



66 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

nized among thinkers, our reigning philosophy 
will modify itself; scientific men will conceive dif- 
ferently from Humboldt (for instance) of the mys- 
tery of life; the materialism which stifles the higher 
instincts of men will be dislodged." She continues 
ardently: ''No truth can he dangerous. What if 
Jesus Christ be taken for a medium, do you say ? 
Well, what then ? As perfect man. He possessed, I 
conclude, the full complement of a man's faculties. 
But if He walked the sea as a medium, if virtue 
went out of Him as a mesmerizer. He also spoke the 
words which never man spake, was born for us, and 
died for us, and rose from the dead as the Lord 
God our Saviour. But the whole theory of spir- 
itualism, all the phenomena, are strikingly con- 
firmatory of revelation; nothing strikes me more 
than that. Hume's argument against miracles 
(a strong argument) disappears before it, and 
Strauss's conclusions from a priori assertion of 
impossibility fall to pieces at once." 

In the midst of this drama of spiritual experience 
she was writing her " Aurora Leigh." How keenly 
she felt the disappointment of her hopes in the 
immediate flow of conclusive proof from masses of 
dim and wavering data, we learn in that wild on- 
slaught of hers on the materialism of the age 
found in the confessions of Romney Leigh in the 
eighth Book of the poem. There she showed how 



The Realms of Mysticism 67 

the futility of the spiritistic search had galled and 
stunned her. The best that she could make her 
Romney do was to find that our speculations are 

little more than 

filling up with clay 
The wards of this great key, the natural world 
And fumbling vainly therefore at the lock 
Of the spiritual, 



until 



we feel ourselves shut in 
With all the wild-beast roar of struggling life, 
The terrors and compunctions of our souls, 
As saints with lions. 



This was what it was to her after all— a "vain 
fumbling at the lock of the spiritual"; and this 
was how she felt — as a soul among lions, the wild- 
beast roar of struggling life about her. 

Later she writes in a somewhat calmer mood. 
Aurora sits and meditates upon her loneliness as 
she remembers her Italian home and her father 
and mother who have passed into the eternal sleep, 
and she says : 

And yet this may be less so than appears, 

This change and separation. Sparrows five 

For just two farthings, and God cares for each. 

If God is not too great for little cares. 

Is any creature, because gone to God? 

I've seen some men, veracious, nowise mad. 

Who have thought or dreamed, declared and testified 

They heard the Dead a-ticking like a clock 

Which strikes the hours of the eternities. 

Beside them, with their natural ears, — and known 

That human spirits feel the human way 



68 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

And hate the unreasoning awe that waves them off 
From possible communion. It may be. 

"It may be" ! And this was as far as all the years 
of thought and research in the realm of spiritistic 
investigation could lead her. This was all to 
which she was willing to give the seal of art from 
her known hand to the world. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CHRIST 

Mrs. Browning's view of Jesus Christ was a 
personal and immediate one. Every event in his 
life was realized vividly to her poetic vision, and 
was held precious and native as of the things that 
she had actually seen and that were circled about 
a near and beloved friend. She cherished through 
life a strong desire to go to Jerusalem, but from 
fulfilling this wish she was in earlier life deterred 
by her ill health, and later by straightened means. 
But it was almost as if she had been there and 
had seen the very footsteps of Jesus upon the soil 
of Palestine, so permeated does her poetry seem to 
be, not only with his spirit but with his life, his 
every act and movement. As a babe she pictures 
him in the Virgin's arms while the pure mother 
looks down upon him musing, wondering: 

Awful is this watching place, 
Awfiil what I see from hence — 
A king, without regalia, 
A God, without the thunder, 
A child, without the heart for play; 
Ay, a Creator, rent asunder 
From his first glory and cast away 
On his own world, for me alone 
To hold in hands created, crying — Son! 
69 



70 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

The mother of Jesus had a large place in the 
thought of this woman poet. Her translation of 
some stanzas of the Stabat Mater has a woman- 
like and very tender strain. 

Mother full of lamentation, 

Near that cross she wept her passion, 

Whereon hiing her child and Lord. 
Through her spirit worn and wailing, 
Tortured by the stroke and failing, 

Passed and pierced the prophet's sword. 

Oh, sad, sore, above all other, 
Was that ever-blessed mother 

Of the sole-begotten One ; 
She who mourned and moaned and trembled 
While she measured, nor dissembled, 

Such despairs of such a Son! 

Where's the man could hold from weeping, 
If Christ's mother he saw keeping 

Watch with mother-heart undone? 
Who could hold from grief, to view her, 
Tender mother true and pure, 

Agonizing with her Son ? 

For her people's sins she saw Him 
Down the bitter deep withdraw Him 

'Neath the scourge and through the dole! 
Her sweet Son she contemplated 
Nailed to death, and desolated. 

While He breathed away His soul.^ 

Two sayings in the Holy Scriptures are most 
precious to Mrs. Browning: the words "Jesus 
wept" and the one where the Christ turned and 

iThis translation may be found in "The Letters of Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning," edited by Frederic G. Kenyon, vol. ii, pp. 80, 81. 



The Christ 71 

"looked upon Peter." Each gives to her the 
theme for a sonnet, the latter for two — two of the 
most emotion-fraught of all her detached son- 
nets. "The Look" and "The Meaning of the 
Look" are the titles. The pretty half-fanciful 
story in the poem "Memory and Hope" closes 
with a vision of Christ. Hope sees 



that soft subduing look 
Which Peter's spirit shook, 



and then 



Sank downward in a rapture to embrace 
Thy pierced hands and feet with kisses close, 
And prayed Thee to assist her evermore 
To "reach the things before." 

The humanness of Christ makes strong appeal 
to her. To her his "divinest voice" is "complete 
in humanest affection." This thought she en- 
forces in "The Poet's Vow." The meaning of this 
poem she tells us she intends to be that the "crea- 
ture cannot be isolated from the creature." The 
friend who is represented in this poem as wishing 
to press his argument against the poet who desires 
to withdraw himself from all the responsibilities of 
the general human family, and to give himself up 
to a selfish enjoyment of life, makes a plea based 
upon the logic that since Christ appeared as man, 
since he for a time bore man's nature, therefore 
ever after the nature of man has a dignity, a worth, 



72 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

and should have a special value for every seeing 



man. 



What blessing can, from lips of man, 

Approach thee with his sigh? 
Ay, what from earth — create for man 

And moaning in his moan ? 
Ay, what from stars — revealed to man 

And man-named one by one? 
Ay, more! what blessing can be given 
Where the Spirits seven do show in heaven 

A Man upon the throne? 
A man on earth He wandered once, 

All meek and tindefiled, 
And those who loved Him said "He wept"- 

None ever said He smiled ; 
Yet there might have been a smile unseen. 
When He bowed his holy face, I ween,' 

To bless that happy child. 
And now He pleadeth up in heaven 

For our humanities, 
Till the ruddy light on seraph's wings 

In pale emotion dies. 
They can better bear their Godhead's glare 

Than the pathos of his eyes. 
I will go pray our God to-day 

To teach thee how to scan 
His work divine, for human use 

Since earth on axle ran, — 
To teach thee to discern as plain 
His grief divine, the blood-drop's stain 

He left there, Man for man. 
So, for the blood's sake shed by Him 

Whom angels God declare, 
Tears like it, moist and warm with love, 

Thy reverent eyes shall wear 
To see i' the face of Adam's race 

The nature God doth share. 



The Christ 73 

But although the mind of the poet followed the 
course of the earthly life of Christ with closely 
scanning eye in all its detail, it was his death that 
stirred her heart to its deepest depths. With what 
reverence and yet with what tenderness she 
breathes his name when she thinks of his death! 
Her wonderful dramatic poem, "The Seraphim," 
is from beginning to end an expression of this 
feeling, as a series of quotations will show. She 
imagines Ador the strong angel and Zerah the loving 
one to stand at heaven's door about to speed forth to 
earth to be present with a battalion of seraphs at the 
crucifixion of our Lord. As they stand there in the 
pause before setting forth, they talk peacefully 
together. They are speaking of the vast difference 
between the state of earth as they see it and the vision 
of what it was to be that God had at the first, and 
they wonder that so great a change can have taken 
place that his Son — God's Son — should be brought 
to the cross. Yet Ador recalls the angel's song 
of Peace on Earth that was sung at the beginning 
of Christ's life. 

Ador, Peace, where He is. 

Zerah. He! 

Say it again. 

Ador. Where He is. 

Zerah. Can it be 

That earth retains a tree 

Whose leaves hke Eden foliage, can be swayed 
By the breathing of his voice, nor shrink and fade? 



74 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Ador. There is a tree! — it hath no leaf nor root; 
Upon it hangs a curse for all its fruit ; 
Its shadow on his head is laid. 
For He, the crowned Son, 

Has left his crown and throne, 
Walks earth in Adam's clay, 
Eve's snake to braise and slay — 
Zerah. Walks earth in clay? 

Ador. And walking in the clay which he created, 
He through it shall touch death. 
What do I utter? what conceive? did breath 
Of demon howl it in a blasphemy? 
Or was it mine own voice, informed, dilated 
By the seven confluent Spirits? Speak— answer me! 
Who said man's victim was his deity? 

Zerah. Beloved, beloved, the word came forth from thee. 
Thine eyes are rolling a tempestuous light 

Above, below, around. 
As putting thunder-questions without cloud. 

Reverberate without sound, 
To universal nature's depth and height. 
The tremor of an inexpressive thought 
Too self-amazed to shape itself aloud, 
O'erruns the awful curving of thy lips; 

And while thine hands are stretched above, 
As newly they had caught 
Some lightning from the throne, or showed the Lord 

Some retributive sword, 
Thy brows do alternate with wild eclipse 

And radiance, with contrasted wrath and love, 
As God had called thee to a seraph's part, 
With a man's quailing heart. 

In this dramatic way the emotion of the two 
angels is indicated as they stand there looking 
toward the woeful earth, and weep at the thought 
of the divine sacrifice that is being made. Then 
cries Ador: 



The Christ 75 

O man! and is thy nature so defiled 
That all that holy Heart's devout law-keeping, 
And low pathetic beat in deserts wild, 
And gushings pitiful of tender weeping 
For traitors who consigned it to such woe — 
That all could cleanse thee not, without the flow 
Of blood, the lifeblood — his — and streaming sof 
O earth the thundercleft, windshaken, where 
The louder voice of "blood and blood" doth rise, 
Hast thou an altar for this sacrifice? 

O Heaven! O vacant throne! 
O crowned hierarchies that wear your crown 

When his is put away! 
Are ye unshamed that ye cannot dim 
Your alien brightness to be liker him. 
Assume a human passion, and down-lay 
Your sweet secureness for congenial fears. 
And teach your cloudless ever-burning eyes 

The mystery of his tears? 

By the heart-searching pathos of this thought 
Zerah the loving angel is stung into strength and 
determination. He cries out: 

I am strong, I am strong. 
Were I never to see my heaven again, 
I would wheel to earth like the tempest rain 
Which sweeps there with an exultant soimd 
To lose its life as it reaches the ground. 

I am strong, I am strong. 
Away from mine inward vision swim 
The shining seats of my heavenly birth, 
I see but his, I see but Him — 
The Maker's steps on his cruel earth. 
Will the bitter herbs of earth grow sweet 
To me, as trodden by his feet? 
Will the vexed, accurst humanity, 
As worn by Him, begin to be 



76 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

A blessed, yea, a sacred thing 
For love and awe and ministering? 

I am strong, I am strong. 
By our angel ken shall we survey 
His loving smile through his woeful clay? 

I am swift, I am strong, 
The love is bearing me along. 

So the two angels are borne earthward by the 
strong impulsion of their love. Their longing 
spiritually leads them. 

These are poetic strains of the uplifted rhapsodist, 
yet they are tenderly human. Zerah says to Ador: 

Thy look 
Is fixed on earth, as mine upon thy face. 
Where shall I seek his? 

I have thrown 

One look upon earth, but one, 

Over the blue mountain-lines, 

Over the forest of palms and pines, 

Over the harvest-lands golden, 

Over the valleys that fold in 

The gardens and vines — 
He is not there. 

All these are unworthy 

Those footsteps to bear, 

Before which, bowing down 
I would fain quench the stars of my crown 

In the dark of the earthy. 

Where shall I seek Him? 

Temple and tower. 
Palace and purple would droop like a flower 
(Or a cloud at our breath), 
If he neared in His state 
The outermost gate. 
Ador. Ah me, not so 

In the state of a king did the victim go! 



The Christ 77 

And Thou who hangest mute of speech 

'Twixt heaven and earth, with forehead yet 
Stained by the bloody sweat, 
God! man! Thou hast foregone thy throne in each. 
Zerah. Thine eyes behold Him? 
Ador. Yea, below. 

Track the gazing of mine eyes, 
Naming God within thine heart 
That its weakness may depart 

And the vision rise! 
Seest thou yet, beloved? 
Zerah. I see 

Beyond the city, crosses three 
And mortals three that hang thereon 
'Ghast and silent to the sun. 
Roimd them blacken and welter and press 
Staring multitudes whose father 
Adam was, whose brows are dark 
With his Cain's corroded mark,— 
Who curse with looks. Nay — let me rather 
Turn unto the wilderness! 

Ador. Turn not! God dwells with men. 
Zerah. Above 

He dwells with angels, and they love. 
Can these love? With the living's pride 
They stare at those who die, who hang 
In their sight and die. They bear the streak 
Of the crosses' shadow, black not wide. 
To fall on their heads, as it swerves aside 
When the victim's pang 
Makes the dry wood creak. 
Ador. The cross — the cross! 

Zerah now perceives a woman kneeling whose 

tears drop down- 
Tears! the lovingest man 
Has no better bestowed 
Upon man. 



78 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

But the Crucified One is not in need of tears. 

Then the watching angels see the two malefactors; 

unUke they are. One is a man who bears the 

present marks of sin; but the other — 

Death upon his face 
Is rather shine than shade, 
A tender shine by looks beloved made : 
He seemeth dying in a quiet place, 
And less by iron wounds in hands and feet 
Than heart-broke by new joy too sudden and sweet. 

And then in a silence which is not the silence of 
death nor yet of sleep, but which spreads through 
the whole universe like a pulse of creation, they 
see the One upon the cross. Zerah looks and the 
flame perishes in his eyes. To Ador's tender in- 
quiry Zerah answers : 

He opened his. 
And looked. I cannot bear — 

Ador. Their agony? 

Zerah. Their love. God's depth is in them. From his 
brows 
White, terrible in meekness, didst thou see 

The lifted eyes unclose? 
He is God, seraph! 

Ador. The loving is 

Sublimed within them by the sorrowful. 
In heaven we could sustain them. 

The two seraphs wonder to see the Jehovah-man 

renouncing until he seems to be feebler than his 

work, sadder than his creature. 

With unkinged brow ! 
Grief -bearer for thy world, 



The Christ 79 

"But the love," cries Zerah, "the love, mine 
Ador!" 

Ador. Do we love not? 

Zerah. Yea, 

But not as man shall! . . . 

Ador. Love him more! O man, 

Than sinless seraphs can! 

Zerah. Yea, love him more! 

Voices of the Angelic Multitude. Yea, more ! 

Ador. The loving word 

Is caught by those from whom we stand apart. 
For silence hath no deepness in her heart 
Where love's low name low breathed would not be heard 
By angels, clear as thunder. 

Angelic Voices. Love him more! 

Ador. Sweet voices, swooning o'er 
The music which ye make! 
Albeit to love there were not ever given 
A mournful sound when uttered out of heaven. 
That angel-sadness ye would fitly take. 
Of love be silent now! we gaze adown 
Upon the incarnate Love who wears no crown. 

Zerah. The pathos hath the day undone: 
The death-look of his eyes 
Hath overcome the sun 
And made it sicken in its narrow skies. 
Ador. Is it to death? He dieth. 
Zerah. Through the dark 

He still, he only, is discernible — 
The naked hands and feet transfixed stark, 
The countenance of patient anguish white, 

Do make themselves a light 
More dreadful than the glooms which round them dwell, 
And therein do they shine. 

A dor. God ! Father-God ! 

Both angels now offer to the Father an impas- 



So Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

sioned prayer that he would come and help and 
succor the One suffering upon the cross. But no 
ray of Hght shines down from the throne above, 
and soon the Voice from the Cross is heard to 
cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou me for- 
saken ?" The Voice of the Earth now speaks: 

Ah me, ah me, ah me! the dreadful Why! 
My sin is on thee, sinless one ! Thou art 
God-orphaned, for my burden on thy head. 
Dark sin, white innocence, endurance dread! 
Be still, within your shrouds, my buried dead; 
Nor work with this quick horror round mine heart. 

And now huddHng fallen angels draw near, crying, 
"Do we prevail ?'* 

Voice from the Cross. It is finished ! 
Zerah. Hark, again! 

Like a victor speaks the slain. 
Angel Voices. Finished be the trembling vain! 
Ador. Upward, like a well-loved son, 

Looketh he, the orphaned one. 
Angel Voices. Finished is the mystic pain. 
Voices of Fallen Angels. His deathly forehead at the word 

Gleameth like a seraph sword. 
Angel Voices. Finished is the demon reign. 
Ador. His breath, as living God, createth. 

His breath, as dying man, completeth. 
Angel Voices. Finished work his hands sustain. 

Now the most ancient Voice of the Earth is heard 
reciting a rune that tells how Adam unawakened 
by the knocking of his children at his tomb through 
four thousand years, undisturbed by the groans of 



The Christ 8i 

creation, starts with sudden life as he hears a 
Voice from the Cross, "Father! my spirit to thine 
hands is given!" And Ador, the strong angel, 
finds words to describe the earthly scene: 

Hear the wailing winds that be 

By wings of unclean spirits made ! 

They, in that last look, surveyed 

The love they lost in losing heaven, 
And passionately flee 

With a desolate cry that cleaves 
The natural storms — ^though they are lifting 
God's strong cedar-roots like leaves, 
And the earthquake and the thunder, 
Neither keeping either under, 
Roar and hurtle through the glooms — 
And a few pale stars are drifting 
Past the dark, to disappear, 
What time, from the splitting tombs 
Gleamingly the dead arise. 
Viewing with their death-calmed eyes 
The elemental strategies, 
To witness, victory is the Lord's. 
Hear the wail o' the spirits! hear! 

And Zerah, the angel of love, answers, 

I hear alone the memory of his words. 

And in this receding wave of tragic pathos the 
imagined scene is swept away and the poem closes. 
The impression left is one of personal grief, of a 
personal love. What other poet has brought the 
Christ so near, has so endeared him, has made in 
the heart of the listener a like remorseful pity ? 
When "The Seraphim" was given to the world 



82 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

the writer was almost unknown, and the critics as 
with one voice Hfted up the cry of sacrilege. The 
reader of to-day wonders how that accusation 
could ever have been made against this most rev- 
erent work. Certainly the truly devotional heart 
can find nothing in it to jar the most prayerful 
hour. The young poet had the wisdom to avoid 
any attempt at direct realism. The story is told 
from the standpoint of two intensely interested on- 
lookers, so giving a sense of distance that softens 
the crudeness of minute detail yet does not lessen 
the poignancy of the great emotional crisis; while 
the charming quality of the two highly individual- 
ized seraphs, the angel of love and the angel of 
strength, employs the superfluous energy of the 
reader's interest and leaves the deeper conscious- 
ness free to dwell undisturbed upon the great fea- 
tures of the tragedy. 

Another complaint that the young poet had to 
meet was that she had trenched upon literary 
ground sacred to Milton. This accusation applied 
to this dialogue, "The Seraphim," and also to the 
"Drama of Exile," where she takes up the story 
of our first parents at the moment when they are 
thrust out of their home in Eden and follows them 
as they fled along the sword-glare outside the gate. 
No attempt is to be made here to appraise the 
literary merits of Mrs. Browning's poetry; but we 



The Christ 83 

may be forgiven if we call attention to the fact 
that no poet can preempt sections in any part of 
space, even in chaos. Mrs. Brov^ning made a 
modest comment on a part of the story of Adam 
and Eve that Milton might have v^ritten but did 
not; and, as he did not, she had all right to throw 
her rosy radiance thereon, especially as her scene 
of action lies outside the gate instead of within! 
And as to "The Seraphim" no one could have 
had a more humble estimate than herself. The 
subject seemed to her a daring one; it was beyond 
our sympathies, she said, and therefore beyond the 
sphere of poetry. It lacked unity, and she re- 
peatedly called it a failure. Yet who has written 
a poem that has so made us love Jesus Christ .? 
Certainly the "Paradise Regained," though pre- 
ferred by its author over his vastly superior work, 
has never recommended the Crucified One so to 
our very heart as has the humbler transcript by 
the less ambitious poet. 

Besides many transcripts of incidents in the life 
of Christ and this one great dramatic poem upon 
the event of his death, Mrs. Browning has poured 
forth her devotion to the name of Jesus in four 
beautiful hymns: "A Supplication for Love," "The 
Mediator," "The Weeping Saviour," and "The 
Measure" — the one a plea for love in the church 
by the dying love of the Lord Christ, the second 



84 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

an impassioned outpouring of the heart in grati- 
tude to God for that expression of his greatness 
in the Son, of his purity and strength and kindness 
in the Son's pure hands, and of Christ's appeal 
against the divine justice through his love. 

THE MEDIATOR 

How high Thou art ! our songs can own 
No music Thou couldst stoop to hear! 

But still the Son's expiring groan 
Is vocal in the Father's ear. 

How pure Thou art ! our hands are dyed 
With curses, red with murder's hue — 

But He hath stretched his hands to hide 
The sins that pierced them from thy view. 

How strong Thou art! we tremble lest 
The thunders of thine arm be moved — 

But He is lying on thy breast, 

And Thou must clasp thy Best-beloved ! 

How kind Thou art ! Thou didst not choose 

To joy in Him forever so; 
But that embrace Thou wilt not loose 

For vengeance, didst for love forego ! 

High God, and pure, and strong, and kind! 

The low, the foul, the feeble, spare ! 
Thy brightness in his face we find — 

Behold our darkness only there! 

The other two poems in this group of hymns speak 
of the human tears of Christ over the bier of his 
friend and of our own human tears which God 
has reckoned in a "measure" — the same "meas- 
ure" with which he has "comprehended the dust 



The Christ 85 

of the earth," The word for "measure," the 
young Greek and Hebrew scholar tells us in a 
footnote, is the same in the Hebrew Scriptures in 
the two places and occurs nowhere else in that 
book. 

None of these poems are properly hymns — ^that 
is, they are evidently not written for singing. In 
the volume of 1833, however, which contained her 
translation of the ** Prometheus Bound," there 
were included also, not without apology, a few 
other poems written by the translator. Among 
them were several that show the young poet's 
devotion to Christ. "Earth," "The Image of 
God," "Idols," "Weariness," "The Appeal," are 
titles of some of these. But, above all, there is a 
hymn of seven rarely beautiful stanzas that shows 
the same spirit. This hymn was the only poem 
selected by her from the volume of 1833 for pres- 
ervation in a following collection, and it well de- 
serves cherishing — and singing too. A part is here 
quoted : 

Since without Thee we do no good, 

And with Thee do no ill, 
Abide with us in weal and woe, — 

In action and in will. 



By hours of day, that when our feet 

O'er hill and valley run, 
We still may think the light of truth 

More welcome than the sun. 



86 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

By hours of night, that when the air 

Its dew and shadow yields, 
We still may hear the voice of God 

In silence of the fields. 

Abide with us, abide with us. 

While flesh and soul agree; 
And when our flesh is only dust, 

Abide our souls with Thee. 

In every way the thought of Jesus is made a com- 
fort. In " A Thought for a Lonely Deathbed " she 
recalls the "permitted desolations" of his life — ^the 
"drear wine-press," the "wilderness outspread," 
the "lone garden," and prays by all of these that 
he will come to help. 

No earthly friend being near me, interpose 
No deathly angel 'twixt my face and thine, 
But stoop Thyself to gather my life's rose, 
And smile away my mortal to Divine! 

And in her thought of heaven the chief attraction 
is that Christ will at last be seen by her own eyes ! 

Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet 
From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low 
Lest I should fear and fall, and miss Thee so 
Who art not missed by any that entreat. 

But Jesus Christ was far more to her than a 
subject full of literary material; he was the mani- 
festation of God. "God's will is so high above 
humanity," she wrote in 1840, "that its goodness 
and perfectness cannot be scanned at a glance, 
and would be very terrible if it were not for His 



The Christ 87 

manifested love — manifested in Jesus Christ. Only 
that holds out hearts together when He shatters 
the world." 

Never does she show that this view of Christ's 
being and character besets her with any intel- 
lectual difficulty. On the contrary, she thought 
that there was nothing so "ennobling to the nature 
and mind of man as the view which represents it 
raised into communion with God himself by the 
justification and purification of God himself. Pla- 
to's dream brushed by the gate of this doctrine 
when it walked highest, and won for him the 
title 'Divine.'" 

It is as God that she thinks of Jesus Christ in 
his human life. A stanza in "The Soul's Travel- 
ing" shows how fully she identifies Christ and 
God: 

O blissful Mouth which breathed the mournful breath 
We name our souls, self-spoilt ! — ^by that strong passion 
Which paled Thee once with sighs, by that strong death 
Which made Thee once unbreathing — from the wrack 
Themselves have called around them, call them back, 
Back to Thee in continuous aspiration! 

For here, O Lord, 
For here they travel vainly, vainly pass 
From city-pavement to untrodden sward 
Where the lark finds her deep nest in the grass 
Cold with the earth's last dew. Yea, very vain 
The greatest speed of all these souls of men 
Unless they travel upward to the throne 
Where sittest Thou the satisfying One, 



88 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

With help for sins and holy perfectings 
For all requirements : while the archangel, raising 
Unto thy face his full ecstatic gazing, 
Forgets the rush and rapture of his wings. 

The divinity of Christ she implies everywhere. 

The man most man, with tenderest human hands, 
Works best for men, — as God in Nazareth. 

And again: 

God's self would never have come down to die, 
Could man have thanked Him for it. 

And when in that wonderful zodiac vision in the 
"Drama of Exile" Christ appears and says, "I 
am here," Adam is made to respond, "This is 
God!" It was as God that she thinks of him 
after the close of his life on earth. He represents 
the Divine in the onward going of history. In 
" De Profundis " she says : 

He reigns below, He reigns alone. 
And, having life in love foregone 
Beneath the crown of sovran thorns. 
He reigns the Jealous God. Who mourns 
Or rules with Him, while days go on? 

In "The Cry of the Human" the answerless 
questions that beset the human soul are drawn up 
in line, the tempest, the battle, the plague, the 
greed of man and the inequalities of human con- 
dition working woe to the unfortunate and the 
inadequate, the shortness of human love, sickness 



The Christ 89 

and — death; then in one sweep her faith looks up 
and over all: 

Then, soul of mine, 
Look up and triumph rather! 
Lo, in the depth of God's Divine 
The Son adjures the Father, 
Be pitiful, O God! 

"Never at any point of my life/' she said in 
1854, "and now, thank God, least of all, have 
I felt myself drawn toward Unitarian opinions. 
I should throw up revelation altogether if I 
ceased to recognize Christ as Divine." Again, it 
seemed to her, she said, that the Unitarians threw 
over what was *'most beautiful in Christian doc- 
trine." And thus she went on to the end, "be- 
lieving in Christ's divinity, which is the life of 
Christianity," as she said in a letter written in the 
spring of 1861, just a short time before her death. 

When she looks upon the life and work of Christ 
upon earth as representing the Divine come to 
man, she still sees that his death is the most not- 
able event in that life : 

The Christ Himself had been no Lawgiver 
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law. 

Without dogmatizing on the theories of various 
theologians she recognizes that Christ is mysteri- 
ously essential in the work of subduing sin, as she 
shows in "The Weeping Saviour"; and that the 



90 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

very cross itself is a manifestation of God's love 
to his Son. What would humanity have been if 
Christ had not come to bring life and immortality 
to light ? In " Aurora Leigh " she says : 

For us, we are called to mark 
A still more intimate humanity 
In this inferior nature, or ourselves 
Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfoot 
By veritable artists. Earth (shut up 
By Adam, like a fakir in a box 
Left too long buried) remained stiff and dry, 
A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down 
Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes, 
And used his kingly chrism to straighten out 
The leathery tongue turned back into the throat; 
Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates 
In every limb, aspires in every breath, 
Embraces infinite relations. 

To her, Christ was the foundation of character; in 
her philosophy the only place where the virtues 
could grow was 

In that sole garden where Christ's brow dropped blood. 

This for the individual; and, as to mankind at 
large. 

The soul's the way. Not even Christ Himself 
Can save man else than as He holds man's soul; 
And therefore did He come into our flesh 
As some wise hunter creeping on his knees, 
With a torch, into the blackness of a cave. 
To face and quell the beast there — take the soul, 
And so possess the whole man, body and soul. 

So Christ, by giving the knowledge of immortal 



The Christ 91 

life and by pointing out the way of life in human 
affairs and by substantiating his teachings by his 
life and death, brought to human endeavor a mo- 
tive and an inspiration which is as marked and 
startling as would be a resurrection from the dead, 
and which is as an abundant and irrepressible in- 
flowing of dynamic life into the whole dead world. 
And this shall go on. " For civilization perfected," 
she says in " Italy and the World," " is fully de- 
veloped Christianity." She had a strong, buoyant 
faith in the ultimate outcome for good. She be- 
lieved too actively in God's goodness to share the 
gloomy views that were so large a part of a faith- 
ful Christian's duty at the time when her young 
theories were crystallizing. Whatever her theories, 
an ultimate optimism was a belief accepted un- 
questioningly. 

But the end she looked for was no spectacular 
drama; she doubted whether Christ's second com- 
ing would be personal. She said: "What I expect 
is, a great development of Christianity in opposi- 
tion to the churches, and of humanity generally 
in opposition to the nations, and I look out for 
this in much quiet hope." 

In spite of this definitely crystallized body of 
opinions, Mrs. Browning's attitude is far from be- 
ing, within evangelical limits, sectarian. To her 
there was only "one church in heaven and earth, 



92 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

with one Divine High Priest to it — let exclusive 
religionists build what walls they pleased and bring 
out what chrisms." As to the church in general, 
she sometimes lifted up her voice in reproof — 
though not harshly. 

I hence appeal 
To the dear Christian Church — 

is the form of her exhortation. In her reproof she 
identifies herself with the church, as in "A Sup- 
plication for Love"; and when she says, 

God, named Love, whose fount Thou art, 
Thy crownless Church before Thee stands, 

With too much hating in her heart, 
And too much striving in her hands ! — 

she has humbly included herself in the prayer for 
grace. 



CHAPTER V 

THE WORLD OF NATURE 

In a beautiful poem on "The Poet" Mrs. 

Browning describes him as one who has 

the child's sight in his breast 
And sees all new; 

who "views with the first glory" "what oftenest 

he has viewed." She was herself of this race by 

the right sign. To her the world was a source 

of perpetual wonder. 

Nothing should surprise us any more, 
Who see that miracle of stars, 

would be what she would say. So all the world 
of nature and of God the Creator thereof was 
taken by her on the same terms of inexplicable 
mystery. To one to whom the miracle of the crea- 
tion and existence of God has passed the gateway 
of doubt, the voice of nature could not be for- 
biddingly cold. She heard that voice when she 
imagined that Nature came boldly and said, "I 
am ambassador for God!" So then to her, nature 
was, if rightly understood, all good. Yet was it 
not always understood; for her, nature included a 
realm of supernature where higher laws and higher 
ideals held sway. 

93 



94 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Oh, beautiful 
Art thou, Earth, 

she cried in "Earth and Her Praisers"; yet she 

added, 

albeit worse 
Than in heaven is called good! 

And again, 

Alas, our earthly good 
In heaven thought evil, seems too good for Thee, 

said the Virgin Mary to the child Jesus. Yet good, 
eminently good, is the realm of earth. She can 
even sometimes look over and beyond the darker 
facts of existence and still see the vision of good. 
Aurora says to Romney: 

"You believe 

In God, for your part? — ay? that He who makes 

Can make good things from ill things, best from worst, 

As men plant tulips upon dunghills when 

They wish them finest?" 

And he ansv^ers : 

"True. A death-heat is 
The same as life-heat, to be accurate, 
And in all nature is no death at all. 
As men account of death, so long as God 
Stands witnessing for life perpetually, 
By being just God." 

In the end one's faith can include the conception 

that 

The circle of God's life 
Contains all life beside. 

And in this thought her faith was imbedded so 



The World of Nature 95 

deeply that she was sometimes impatient with the 

intellectual pride of 

our modern thinker who turns back 
The strata . . . granite, limestone, coal, and clay, 
Concluding coldly with "Here's law! where's God?" 

A pagan, kissing for a step of Pan 

The wild-goat's hoof -print on the loamy down. 

Stands in a higher rank than does that man of 
latest knowledge. Then again she sends forth a 
blast against the materialist, as in the following 
passage from "Aurora Leigh": 

Everywhere 
We're too materialistic, — eating clay 
(Like men of the west) instead of Adam's corn 
And Noah's wine— clay by handfuls, clay by lumps, 
Until we're filled up to the throat with clay, 
And grow the grimy color of the ground 
On which we are feeding. Ay, materialist 
The age's name is. God Himself, with some, 
Is apprehended as the bare result 
Of what his hand materially has made, 
Expressed in such an algebraic sign 
Called God— that is, to put it otherwise, 
They add up nature to a nought of God, 
And cross the quotient. There are many even, 
Whose names are written in the Christian Church 
To no dishonor, diet still on mud 
And splash the altars with it. You might think 
The clay Christ laid upon their eyelids when. 
Still blind, He called them to the use of sight, 
Remained there to retard its exercise 
With clogging incrustations. Close to heaven, 
They see for mysteries, through the open doors. 
Vague pufEs of smoke from pots of earthenware, 



96 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

And fain would enter, when their time shall come, 
With quite another body than Saint Paul 
Has promised — husk and chaff, the whole barley-corn. 
Or Where's the resurrection? 

Nature is a great symbol; it affords on all sides 
and in every concrete example a lesson of the 
higher things. The thorny bloom of the gorse, 
growing bleakly on the mountain heights, yields 
her its word, teaching us. 

From that academic chair 
Canopied with azure air, 

the lesson of living on the heights yet "low along 
the ground beside the grasses meek." But we 
must go farther. Speaking for the clan of poets, 
she admonishes: 

For us, we are called to mark 
A still more intimate humanity 
In this inferior nature, or ourselves 
Must fall like dead leaves trodden under foot 
By veritable artists. 

This "still more intimate humanity" is a close and 
almost mystic tie between the heart of man and 
the "solemn-beating heart" of nature. In the 
"Drama of Exile" the angel Gabriel, arguing 
against Lucifer, says: 

Through heaven and earth 
God's will moves freely, and I follow it. 
As color follows light. He overflows 
The firmamental walls with deity, 
Therefore with love; his lightnings go abroad, 
His pity may do so, his angels must, 
Whene'er He gives them charges. 



The World of Nature 97 

"As color follows light"! — so intimate is the tie 
between the Being of God and the souls he has 
created. Again, as color is to form, so close is 
the relation of beauty to love in the sweep of 
divine energy through the universe. Let the 
whole passage in all its dramatic strength be read. 
Lucifer is speaking: 

Look on me, woman! Am I beautiful? 
and Eve makes answer: 

Thou hast a glorious darkness. 

Lucifer Nothing more? 

Eve. I think, no more. 

Lucifer. False Heart — thou thinkest more! 
Thou canst not choose but think, as I praise God, 
Unwillingly but fully, that I stand 
Most absolute in beauty. As yourselves 
Were fashioned very good at best, so we 
Sprang very beauteous from the creant Word 
Which thrilled behind us, God himself being moved 
When that august work of a perfect shape, 
His dignities of sovran angelhood. 
Swept out into the universe, — divine 
With thunderous movements, earnest looks of gods. 
And silver-solemn clash of cymbal wings. 
Whereof was I, in motion and in form, 
A part not poorest. And yet, — yet, perhaps, 
This beauty which I speak of is not here. 
As God's voice is not here, nor even my crown — 
I do not know. What is this thought or thing 
Which I call beauty? Is it thought, or thing? 
Is it a thought accepted for a thing? 
Or both ? or neither ? — a pretext — a word ? 
Its meaning flutters in me like a flame 
Under my own breath : my perceptions reel 



98 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

For evermore around it, and fall off, 
As if it too were holy. 

Eve. Which it is. 

Adam. The essence of all beauty, I call love. 
The attribute, the evidence, and end, 
The consummation to the inward sense, 
Of beauty apprehended from without, 
I still call love. As form, when colorless. 
Is nothing to the eye, — that pine-tree there, 
Without its black and green, being all a blank, — 
So, without love, is beauty undiscerned 
In man or angel. Angel! rather ask 
What love is in thee, what love moves to thee, 
And what collateral love moves on with thee; 
Then shalt thou know if thou art beautiful. 

Thus Lucifer — alas, poor angel! — learns that hu- 
man beings have a language that he cannot under- 
stand; and, while a "starry harmony remote" 
comes nearer and seems to "measure the heights 
from whence he fell," he breathes the question and 
the wonder of his lost soul — 

Love! what is love? I lose it. Beauty and love! 
I darken to the image. Beauty — love! 

He fades away, while a low music sounds, leaving 
Adam and Eve to whisper happiness to each other 
that they have found out that "by the love and 
faith" they do "exceed the stature of this angel." 
Her cosmic imagination dwells upon the creation 
of worlds. In the " Drama of Exile " she puts into 
the lips of Christ these words: 

Eternity stands alway fronting God; 
A stern colossal image, with blind eyes 



The World of Nature 99 

And grand dim lips that murmur evermore 

God, God, God! while the rush of life and death, 

The roar of act and thought, of evil and good. 

The avalanches of the ruining worlds 

Tolling down space, — the new world's genesis 

Budding in fire, — the gradual humming growth 

Of the ancient atoms and first forms of earth, 

The slow procession of the swathing seas 

And firmamental waters, — and the noise 

Of the broad, fluent strata of pure airs, — 

All these flow onward in the intervals 

Of that reiterated sound of — God! 

Which WORD innumerous angels straightway lift 

Wide on celestial altitudes of song 

And choral adoration, and then drop 

The burden softly, shutting the last notes 

In silver wings. 

Some mystic theory of the emergence of worlds 
always had attractions for her; yet the doctrine of 
evolution as it became popularized in her early 
years she did not receive favorably. Mrs. Jame- 
son tried vainly to convince her that the "Vestiges 
of Creation" was a most comforting work, but she 
took it to be one of the most melancholy, and 
persisted in a "determinate counsel" not to be a 
fully developed monkey if she could help it. That 
was in 1847; perhaps she becomes more reconciled 
afterward, for eight years later she lets Romney 
bolster up his argument with Aurora by the fol- 
lowing : It had not much 

Consoled the race of mastodons to know. 

Before they went to fossil, that anon 

Their place would quicken with the elephant. 



100 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

But though the doctrine frequently seemed offen- 
sive to her in its particular application, in the 
large it passed muster more easily. The future 
outward developments swept in long reaches before 
her spirit and led on to the more familiar glories 
of a millennial epoch. God acknowledged the 
"leal and earnest search" of man "for Fair and 
Right, through doubtful forms by earth accounted 
real,'' 

The ultimate Perfection leaning bright 
From out the sun and stars to bless. 

Mrs. Browning's visions of the creation of the 
world are Miltonic rather than biblical. Was 
there a time of primal innocence for the race of 
man ? In "The Seraphim" she uses the thought 
in the structure of the story, and again in the 
" Drama of Exile." At the gate of Eden, which is 
now built up with " a final cloud of sunset," Ga- 
briel appears to interrupt the blatant boasting of 
Lucifer: 

This is not heaven, even in a dream, nor earth, 
As earth was once, first breathed among the stars, 
Articulate glory from the mouth divine, 
To which the myriad spheres thrilled audibly, 
Touched like a lutestring, and the sons of God 
Said Amen, singing it. 

And as the two seraphim, who are to go to earth 
to be near the Christ at the hour of his crucifixion. 



The World of Nature ioi 

wait for the moment to come when they shall set 
forth, Ador says to Zerah, 

Didst thou bear thee 
Ever to this earth ? 

And Zerah answers: 

Before. 
When thrilling from His hand along 
Its lustrous path with spheric song 
The earth was deathless, sorrowless, 
Unfearing, then, pure feet might press 
The grasses brightening with their feet, 
For God's own voice did mix its sound 
In a solemn confluence oft 
With the river's flowing round, 
And the life-tree's waving soft. 
Beautiful new earth and strange! 

The idea that the inharmoniousness in nature's 
world, as well as in the human life, is due to 
the entrance of sin, seems to have been w^ith her 
not a poetic fancy only. The steps of the "wan- 
dering sinners," Adam and Eve, struck "a sense 
of death to me," says the Spirit of Harmless Earth; 
then the heart of earth, once calm, trembled like 
the "ragged foam along the ocean-waves" and the 
** restless earthquakes rocked against each other." 
For to 

Him, whose forming word 
Gave to Nature flower and sward. 
She hath given back again, 
For the myrtle — the thorn, 
For the sylvan calm — the human scorn. 



102 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Even in the little child, the "Adam in him'' will 
forego "all privilege of Eden" and take away that 
sympathy with nature that belongs by right to the 
soul unvisited by sin. Another explanation of the 
intangible something wrong that all human beings 
recognize in the heart is perhaps attempted in the 
noble answer of Eve to the accusing Earth Spirits. 
With a delightful quaintness in method, the poet 
allows her heroine, the stricken Eve, to realize that 
the "sense of beauty and of melody" in her are 
aided no longer 

by the sense 
Of personal adjustment to those heights 
Of what I see well-formed or hear well-tuned, 
But rather coupled darkly and made ashamed 
By my percipiency of sin and fall 
In melancholy of humiliant thoughts. 

But there is a hopeful strain where the Earth 
Spirits again taunt Adam: 

We, in heirdom of your soul, 
Flash the river, lift the palm-tree. 

The dilated ocean roll, 
By the thoughts that throbbed within 

you, round the islands. 
Alp and torrent shall inherit 

Your significance of will, 
And the grandeur of your spirit 

Shall our broad savannahs fill. 

Turning from the vast to those forms of nature 
that come nearer and are more tangible, we see 



The World of Nature 103 

what intimate friendships a poet who spent the 
greater part of her years in an invaHd's room 
could have with such objects of nature as she 
could draw into the circle of acquaintance. 

About twenty years of her early life she spent 
at Hope End, in the beautiful Malvern Hills — the 
hills of Piers Plowman's visions and of hers. Here 
she had every opportunity for close contact with 
natural loveliness in the gentle country about her 
and in the gardens of her father's estate, as certain 
poems show, especially "Hector in the Garden," 
"The Lost Bower," "The Deserted Garden," and 
"An Island," as well as many descriptions of 
English scenery elsewhere throughout the longer 
works. She had a garden of her own, which "she 
cut out into a great Hector of Troy, in relievo^ 
with a high heroic box nose and shoeties of colum- 
bine" — just as she describes in her poem "Hector." 
Those were the days when, as she said, the Greeks 
were her demigods and haunted her out of Pope's 
Homer, until she "dreamt more of Agamemnon 
than of Moses the black pony!" How else she 
dreamed the hours and the days away one may 
learn in "The Lost Bower." Then followed the 
second twenty years — but how different indeed 
were they! An enforced exile from life, she was 
shut in by walls made of London fog, chilling and 
heaven-high! Then later came the blessed release 



104 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

through her happy marriage with Robert Brown- 
ing, and the removal to Italy where the world 
with its treasures of mountain beauty was again 
thrown open to her eyes. The sea, however — that 
never came back to her — never after her brother's 
death. 

In "An Island," that tour de force of pure fancy, 
she dreams of a perfect place for an ideal life. 
To this Utopia she was willing to have come only 

Those who would change man's voice and use 

For Nature's way and tone — 
Man's veering heart and careless eyes 
For Nature's steadfast sympathies. 

And her list of the creatures she will allow to enter 
her quiet, peaceful paradise — the "free gamesome 
horses," the "buffaloes upon the slopes," the 
hedgehogs and the snakes — shows that her group 
for an arcadia was certainly formed upon catholic 
principles. It was a catalogue for an invalid 
walled in by London fog! Yet the prodigal beauty 
of the world — though sometimes two little tears 
sufficed to cover all — appealed to the secluded one 
in her room; and the things of nature that she 
did have in those imprisoned years she looked at 
so long and lovingly that she came to know them 
and to love them better than another more priv- 
ileged might have done. During the London 
period the flowers she knows are mostly those that 



The World of Nature 105 

come in the folds of a letter; but these can afford 
subject for a poem, though the matter be more in 
apology than otherwise for caring for so humble 
a thing. 

A chamber window was the spot 
It grew in, from a garden pot, 

Among the city shadows: 
If any, tending it, might seem 
To smile, 'twas only in a dream 

Of nature in the meadows. 

Later, indeed, there were other flowers — those sent 
by Robert Browning which he cut from plants of 
his own careful tending in days when the possession 
of hothouse blooms was not the common experience 
that it is to-day. She loved camellias almost better 
than roses; and, to abuse herself with a vain deceit 
of rural life, she had ivy planted in a box in her 
room where it flourished and spread over one 
window, and struck against the glass with a little 
stroke from the thicker leaves, and then she thought 
of forests and groves. 

Then there were the doves. She said once, "I 
hear and see nothing except my doves and the 
fireplace." Again she said: "My doves are my 
chief acquaintances, and I am so very intimate 
with them that they accept and even demand my 
assistance in building their innumerable nests." 
Finally, when a new little dove appeared from the 
shell, she said whimsically: "I and the senior doves 



io6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

feel equally delighted and we all three in the ca- 
pacity of good sitters and indefatigable putters- 
about take a good deal of credit upon ourselves." 
Nothing needs to be said as to Mrs. Browning's 
love for her dog Flush, that fine little companion 
who was certainly a gentleman and a poet if ever 
a dog was! — and who was careful and jealous 
about everything that belonged to his mistress, 
even to her ^Eolian harp. His devoted owner, who 
celebrated his virtues in the finest poem about a 
dog that was ever written — and we are remem- 
ing George Meredith and Swinburne as we 
say it — said at one time that she did not see 
why Miss Martineau's apocalyptic housemaid 
could not speak out and prophesy whether 
Flush had a soul and what its future destina- 
tion was to be. "As to the fact of his soul," 
she said humorously, "I have long had a strong 
opinion on it." Then she adds: "The grand 
peut-Qtre, to which without revelation the human 
argument is reduced, covers dog-nature with the 
sweep of its fringes." It is good to know that 
Flush lived to a ripe old age and now reposes 
honorably in the vaults of Casa Guidi. 

When Mrs. Browning came to Italy she found 
some old friends: nightingales, of course, the 
opal snake, the large - mouthed frog, moths, 
butterflies, bats; and she made some new ones. 



The World of Nature 107 

The fireflies of Italy interested her, those '^ights- 
o-love" 

that suspire 
In short soft lapses of transported flame 
Across the tingling Dark; 



an 



d the 



melodious owls 
(If music had but one note and was sad, 
'Twould sound just so) ; 

the lizards, the green lightning of the walls, and 
the crickets — her whole passage about the crickets 
is exquisite. 

And now she saw for the first time great moun- 
tains, "jagged mountains, rolled together like pre- 
Adamite beasts and setting their teeth against the 
sky!" After a while she was able to go among 
them, and to see from above great seas of moun- 
tains "looking alive among the clouds," as they did 
at the Bagni di Lucca and at other places where 
they went to escape the summer heat. Then she 
could feel as never before the "charm of the 
mountains, whose very heart you seem to hear 
beating in the rush of the little river, the green 
silence of the chestnut forests," and they two could 
lose themselves " in the woods and mountains and 
sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit 
nights." So we understand who is really speak- 
ing when Aurora cries, 



io8 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

And now I come, my Italy, 
My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills, 
How I burn toward you ? do you feel to-night 
The urgency and yearning of my soul. 
As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe 
And smile ? — Nay, not so much as when in heat 
Vain lightnings catch at your inviolate tops 
And tremble while ye are steadfast. Still ye go 
Your own determined, calm, indifferent way 
Toward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light. 
Of all the grand progression naught left out, 
As if God verily made you for yourselves 
And would not interrupt your life with ours. 

She loved the Italian forests of chestnut and the 
olive groves "shading the ground v^ith tents of 
silvery network," and the "seclusion in the deep 
of the pine forests — ^which have such a strange 
dialect in the silence they speak with." We can 
almost imagine that we see the little figure of the 
poet tucked away in a hamper that was being 
drawn upward into the hills, as she once was 
carried by two white bullocks. Perhaps in some 
Vallombrosan shade she calls a moment's halt 
while they stand and listen to the silence; forte 
her sometimes 

So sweet a silence ministered, 
God seemed to use it for a word. 

We have seen how the mind of the poet has 
dwelt on the mystery of color and has spiritualized 
its meaning; we do not need to be told that she has 
an ear that is sensitive to all nature's sounds and 



The World of Nature 109 

silences. An early poem called "Sounds" shows 
her thought of how the pulses of the universe in 
river and in ocean, in the voice of the woodland 
dove which is "like a singing in a dream," of the 
lark who, 

with more of mirth 
In his song than suits the earth, 
Droppeth some in soaring high 
To pour the rest out in the sky, 

and in all the groans and sobs and palpitations of 
mankind, lead up to the still small voice that 
speaks in the soul of man. 

Let it be said in passing that the lark cannot 
complain that it has not had its fair share of tribute 
from Mrs. Browning. If all her lovely sayings 
about this long-established Royal Majesty of birds 
were selected and fitted together into one work — 
were such a thing possible — the poem would be a 
worthy member in the poetic lark-sisterhood. 
That, of course, is saying a good deal, but not too 
much. 

In the exquisite use of silence she was a prophecy 
of Maeterlinck, or rather of the fine sensitiveness 
to delicate and meaning silences which is a char- 
acteristic of the poetry of to-day. She must have 
loved silence for itself alone. 

In compensation for our stormy years, 
she prayed. 

Vouchsafe us such a half-hour's hush alone, 



no Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

as was that "silence in heaven about the space of 
half an hour" of which we read in the Revelation. 
She could use silence for a word, even for the mean- 
ing of many a word, and especially for things that 
could not be put into words. In "Aurora Leigh" 
she once utilizes a moment of utter stillness with a 
dramatic effect such as is seen in that beautiful 
instance in the "Idylls of the King" where, in the 
pause of King Arthur's speech to the repentant 
Guinevere at the Holy House of Almsbury, "far 
off a solitary trumpet blew." In both "The Sera- 
phim" and the "Drama of Exile" the conclusion 
is accentuated by the compelling force of a heavily 
weighted silence. To her silence was a sister of 
music and had in it "a sense of music which was 
rather felt than heard." She guessed that when 
the nightingale is loitering in the Happy Islands 
she is there "learning music from the silence"; 
and when the angels gather round a sleeping child, 

'Tis the child-heart draws them, singing 

In the silent-seeming clay — 

Singing! — stars that seem the mutest go in music all the way. 

Then the soft dim sounds that are next door to 
silence are very exquisite to her ear. In "A 
Drama of Exile," when the Spirits of the Harmless 
Earth began to speak, Adam cried out, 

O bleak sound, 
O shadow of sound, O phantasm of thin sound! 



The World of Nature hi 

and as they still came "wheeling and wheeling in 
continuous wail around the cyclic zodiac," that 
"phantasm of thin sound" drew 

a straight line of articulate song 
From out that spiral faintness of lament, 

that, by one voice, could express many griefs. In 
that drama of our first parents, it was a most ex- 
cellent conception which made the spirits of the 
trees and the rivers and the flowers of Eden 
breathe forth farewells to the exiled pair as they 
passed beyond the gate and down the path of the 
sword-glare. Then all the happy sounds of Eden 
say their good-byes, "expiring at Eden's door." 

The sylvan sounds, no longer audible, 
Expire at Eden's door. 

Each footstep of your treading 
Treads out some murmur which ye heard before. 

Farewell! the trees of Eden 
Ye shall hear nevermore. 

How the silence round you shivers, 

While our voices through it go, 
Cold and clear. 

At the end there is silence. Adam and Eve pursue 
their way into the far wilderness. There is a 
sound through the silence, as of the falling tears 
of an angel. 

In this conclusion we see an approach to the 
extrasensual method of description which always 



112 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

gave her so much delight, and which again is a 
prophecy of Maeterlinck in "The Intruder" and 
in "The BHnd." In "The Lay of the Brown 
Rosary" one voice is described as being 

so interwound 
Of the dim and the sweet, 'tis a twilight of sound; 

and in "The Lost Bower" the silence is mystically 
translated: 

As I entered, mosses hushing 

Stole all noises from my foot; 

And a green elastic cushion, 

Clasped within the linden's root 

Took me in a chair of silence very rare and absolute. 

So attractive is this borderland between sound and 
silence and so insistent is the temptation — if we 
should use so strong a word — to a method of ex- 
pression that we would now classify as technically 
romantic and extrasensual, that now and then a 
symbol beckons and the poet can but follow. 

The voice was calm and low. 
And between each word you might have heard 
The silent forests grow. 

It is with some such transcendental interpretation 
that she addresses Hiram Powers' Greek Slave: 

Appeal, fair stone, 
From God's pure heights of beauty against man's wrong! 
Catch up in thy divine face, not alone 
East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong, 
By thunders of white silence, overthrown. 



The World of Nature 113 

In these sincere touches of description born of a 
very delicate sense-perception Mrs. Browning 
shows the signs of kinship with the preraphaeHte 
group and — may we not say again ? — of Hterary 
prophecy. Perhaps it was a feeHng for those 
qualities in her poetry which made Ruskin^ recom- 
mend together those " genuine works of feeling like 
*Maud' and * Aurora Leigh' and the grand pre- 
raphaeHte designs in painting." In fact, most of 
her earlier descriptions go first or last beyond the 
bounds of the realistic impression. Let the painter 
try to bring the following to exact terms on canvas : 

Two pale thin clouds did stand upon 
The meeting line of sea and sky, 
With aspect still and mystic : 
I think they did foresee the sun, 
And rested on their prophecy 
In quietude majestic, 

Then flushed to radiance where they stood. 
Like statues by the open tomb 
Of shining saints half risen. 
The sun! — he came up to be viewed. 
And sky and sea made mighty room 
To inaugurate the vision. 

I oft had seen the dawnlight run 

As red wine through the hills, and break 
Through many a mist's inurning; 
But, here, no earth profaned the sun : 
Heaven, ocean, did alone partake 
The sacrament of morning. 



^See Appendix to the "Elements of Drawing," by Ruskin. 



114 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

God's sabbath morning sweeps the waves; 
I would not praise the pageant high 
Yet miss the dedicature : 
I, carried toward the sinless graves 
By force of natural things, — should I 
Exult in only Nature ? 

The pigments refuse to suggest the likeness of the 
clouds to the "shining saints half risen." But the 
poet has a right to the suggestion by the divine 
supremacy of his art. In the following picture of 
an English scene, where Aurora describes her 
memory of the view from her window at her 
English aunt's home, how true it all seems! We 
see the English lawn, 

Which, after sweeping broadly round the house, 

Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream 

Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself 

Among the acacias, over which you saw 

The irregular line of elms by the deep lane 

Which stopped the grounds and dammed the overflow 

Of arbutus and laurel. . . . 

. . . Behind the elms, 
And through their tops, you saw the folded hills 
Striped up and down with hedges (burly oaks 
Projecting from the line to show themselves). 

To this point we follow with ease; we see it all 
plainly and recognize it for truly English. Then 
Italianate Aurora dips the pen once more and tells 
what she sees further. There is a storm and a 
sunset; after that a "trance of passive glory," and 
then 



The World of Nature 115 

In apparition on the golden sky 
(Alas, my Giotto's background!) the sheep run 
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice 
That run along a witch's scarlet thread. 

Now, what shall we say to that ? Nothing, except 
that we never saw it so, never saw such antics on 
such a sky line, but that we can, however, very 
easily believe that Aurora did. We believed in 
Tennyson's snow-draped peaks on the margin of 
his Lincolnshire marshes, and we can believe in 
Mrs. Browning's sky line, no matter how many 
sheep run along there like mice upon a witch's 
scarlet thread! 

Mrs. Browning knew perfectly well what she 
was doing. Aurora marked her own "pastoral" a 
failure because it was a book 

Of surface-pictures — ^pretty, cold, and false 
With literal transcript, — the worse done, I think, 
For being not ill-done; 

and in "Aurora Leigh " (VIII, 28-6 1 ) the poet shows 
that she can do the "literal transcript," the realistic 
landscape, in such massive pictures as the view of 
Florence from Bellosguardo. There is also a mar- 
velous and highly romantic description of music in 
"The Lost Bower" (stanzas 35-48), of the temple 
of the poet in "A Vision of Poets" (214-250), a 
Turneresque picture; and the whole of "An Is- 
land" is of this kind and reminds one both of "The 
Lotos-eaters " and of " Kabla Khan." Then there 



ii6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

are romantic or idealistic landscapes in "The 
Romaunt of Margret" and in "IsobeFs Child"; 
and many more passages might be named to illus- 
trate her taste and method, a method which is but a 
part of the outreaching of her mind into the realms 
of the supersensual and of the realization that seems 
to have been constantly with her of the nearness 
and the realness of the spiritual. Her similes and 
metaphors show the same thing. She does not ex- 
plain the things of the other world by pictures from 
this — instead she illuminates the things of this 
world by symbols from the other! — as if, indeed, 
the things of the spiritual world were more real 
and clarifying to her mind than the most evident 
facts from the human being's world could be. If 
she saw 

headlong leaps 
Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear 
In leaping through the palpitating pines, 

they were to her 

Like a white soul tossed out to eternity 
With thrills of time upon it. 

To her the wood-ivy, like a spirit, hovers round the 

old hawthorn, and everywhere "mystic Presences 

of power" "upsnatch" her "to the timeless, then 

return" her "to the Hour." Everything in nature 

Witnessed . . . 

To the truth of things, with praises 

Of the beauty of the truth. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE WORLD OF MANKIND 

Mrs. Browning's view of the human Hfe and 
its activities is an unexpectedly vigorous one. Ly- 
ing upon her couch in a room that had no outlook 
upon the London turmoil, no casement v^hence she 
could, like a modern Lady of Shalott, see the pass- 
ing procession of human events, she yet found 
words to cry out, "Help, some angel!'' — praying 
that she might be "no dreamer, no neglecter" in 
the need of the world. 

Twining the vines about her unopened v^indow 
that she may get some touch of summer country in 
her prisoning room, she thinks how she can answer 
her own prayer by letting her voice be heard all 
over the world recommending the best panacea to 
bring surcease of sorrow. At last, "get work, get 
work," she cries; " be sure 'tis better than what you 
work to get." What is the end of work I The 
work itself, the human activity itself, is an end 
sufficiently glorious and satisfying. And what if 
we fail .? Then, we only do what others — many 
others — have done. We have good companion- 
ship ! And it is disgraceful to sit beneath the stars 

and bemoan our fate. 

117 



ii8 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Though we fail indeed, 
You. . . I. . . a score of such weak workers, . . . He 
Fails never. If he cannot work by us, 
He will work over us. . . . 

. . . Every time 
The star winks there, so many souls are born, 
Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm: 
We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars. 
Impatient that we're nothing. 

This is an outburst of stoic philosophy, but it is 
to be considered dramatically. Aurora Leigh is 
saying this to her fussy, priggish lover. Perhaps 
unconsciously Mrs. Browning is realizing that she 
has exalted her large-minded, deep-hearted, warm- 
blooded heroine at the expense of her hero, leaving 
him a prig and a despot, and that the process in- 
cludes a necessity that Auron^ should administer to 
him a little dose of powerful stoicism. How- 
ever, it is a good motive — others being not handy 
at the moment — and harmonizes well in an ethical 
braid for chastisement where such is needed. Joy 
in the work! "To live in a house with windows 
on every side, so as to catch both the morning and 
the evening sunshine, is the best and brightest 
thing we have to do, to say nothing about the 
justest and wisest.'* And she can wish nothing 
better for a friend than what she wrote to Ruskin 
— "a good clear noble year with plenty of work 
and God consciously over all to give you satisfac- 
tion." 



The World of Mankind 119 

After all, it is the artist's joy; and all life was 
viewed by her, consciously or unconsciously, from 
the artist's standpoint. From this vantage ground 
of dignity one sees that there is nothing great and 
that there is nothing small; all work ranks the 
same with God, the supreme Artist. The worker 
sees that 

Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God. 

And therefore the work in any material with any 
place or means is glorified. 

The work itself — to have a work — is quite 
enough joy; but yet another is added. Whatever 
we do, it makes no difference what it is, we are 
answering the need of the world. The world needs 
all. And our love, behind our work, will propel 
it to the places of exact fitness and acceptability! 

The world waits 
For help. Beloved, let us love so well. 
Our work shall still be better for our love, 
And still our love be sweeter for our work. 
And both commended, for the sake of each, 
By all true workers and true lovers born. 

So our work returns to us over-sweetened in com- 
fort and joy. 

There is another compensation. God did not 
"anoint us with his odorous oil" to "reign" but 
to "wrestle"; 



I20 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

and He assigns 
All thy tears over, like pure crystallines, 
For younger fellow- workers of the soil 
To wear for amulets. So others shall 
Take patience, labor, to their heart and hand, 
From thy hand and thy heart and thy brave cheer, 
And God's grace fructify through thee to all. 

This is not far from the teaching of George Eliot 

in her "Choir Invisible"; but Mrs. Browning puts 

a purpose and an inspiration into the humdrum of 

human labor that George Eliot's heavy hand was 

never able to lift itself to write. The sonnet closes 

with this couplet : 

The least flower with a brimming cup may stand 
And share its dewdrop with another near. 

And yet a step further: 

Let others miss me! never miss me, God! 

This is the tenor of the earlier poet's advice. 
Moreover, she reverts as usual to Christ, the cen- 
tral light about which the flame of her genius 
always flows and radiates: 

After Adam, work was curse: 
The natural creature labors, sweats, and frets. 
But, after Christ, work turns to privilege, 
And henceforth, one with our humanity, 
The Six-day Worker working still in us 
Has called us freely to work on with Him 
In high companionship. So, happiest! 
I count that heaven itself is only work 
To a surer issue. 

Built in the image of God, we should 



The World of Mankind 121 

work all silently 
And simply, ... as God does all; 
Distort our nature never for our work, 
Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs. 
The man most man, with tenderest human hands, 
Works best for men, — as God in Nazareth. 

On the general relationships of people in the 
brotherhood of man she had many thoughts, and 
she gives them voice in some of the minor poems, ^ 
but more especially in her comment on the career 
of Romney Leigh. The first great count against 
Romney Leigh, the hero of " Aurora Leigh," that 
long story in verse, is that his theories will not 
stand the test of experience. But that was, of 
course, intended by the author. He is not pre- 
sented to us as an ideal, but as a failure. He com- 
mitted the well-intended crime of trying to marry 
a child of the slums, not for love of her, but as a 
beginning of the new era; and it is meant that this 
well-meant wrong-headedness should fail. Nev- 
ertheless we respect him for his good intentions, 
and in the dark punishment that befell him when 
the misunderstanding people he had benefited 
arose in their uninstructed vengeance and burned 
the home he had made for them, bereaving him of 
sight in the holocaust, we have hearts full of pity 
for him. Moreover, in the absoluteness of his 
repentance we love him. 

"I heard the cries 
Too close," 



122 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
he says; 

' ' I could not hear the angels lift 
A fold of rustling air, nor what they said 
To help my pity." 

And when he describes himself as being 

"So truculent in assumption once. 
So absolute in dogma, proud in aim, 
And fierce in expectation, — I, who felt 
The whole world tugging at my skirts for help, 
As if no other man than I could pull," 

we do not feel that he deserves so intense con- 
demnation. His motive had sprung from a sense 
of sympathy rather than from a trained inteUi- 
gence; and that is an honorable source, if not the 
one from which flow the largest supplies of 
health-giving waters. 

"And I, as man, . . . feel with men 
In the agonizing present,"- 

he says to Aurora. 

"The world was always evil, — ^but so bad?" 

she asks. He answers in sad confirmation: 

"So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is gray 
With poring over the long sum of ill ; 
So much for vice, so much for discontent. 
So much for the necessities of power. 
So much for the connivances of fear, 
Coherent in statistical despairs 
With such a total of distracted life, . . . 
To see it down in figures on a page. 
Plain, silent, clear, as God sees through the earth, 



The World of Mankind 123 

The sense of all the graves, — that's terrible 
For one who is not God, and cannot right 
The wrong He looks on. May I choose indeed, 
But vow away my years, my means, my aims, 
Among the helpers, if there's any help 
In such a social strait ? The common blood 
That swings along my veins is strong enough 
To draw me to this duty." 

Romney is called by the drawing-room gossip a 
Christian SociaHst; but he is not that — except in 
the most sentimental and theoretical branch of 
those early idealists. There is an interesting Ger- 
man student in the room who comments and 
accuses: 

"Who, getting to the top of Pisgah-hill, 
Can talk with one at bottom of the view. 
To make it comprehensible? Why, Leigh 
Himself, although our ablest man, I said. 
Is scarce advanced to see as far as this. 
Which some are : he takes up imperfectly 
The social question — ^by one handle — ^leaves 
The rest to trail. A Christian socialist 
Is Romney Leigh, you underotand." 

Later, the conceited German student lets ofF this 
fling: 

"Leigh himself 
Would fain be a Christian still, for all his wit." 

The aspects of the social question touched upon 
in the plot and characterization and spirit of 
"Aurora Leigh" call our attention to a form of 
Christian socialism; but Mrs. Browning was no 
socialist as we understand the word to-day, or even 



124 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

as she herself understood it. She said at one time : 
"I love liberty so intensely that I hate socialism. 
I hold it to be the most desecrating and dishonor- 
ing to humanity of all creeds. I would rather (for 
me) live under the absolutism of Nicholas of 
Russia than in a Fourier machine, with my in- 
dividuality sucked out of me by a social air-pump." 
She believed in the individual life and in every 
scheme that would develop it to a still greater 
diversity and separateness. "A pale unanimity" 
in personality, in aspiration and endeavor, in at- 
tainment, or in system, was not attractive to her. 
It is a dominant and conscienceless time-spirit that 
in the "Rhapsody of Life's Progress" chants forth, 

Who cares if the lightning is burning the corn ? 
Let us sit on the thrones 

In a purple sublimity, 
And grind down men's bones 

To a pale unanimity. 

In the following she emphasizes that thought which 
has become the fetich of myriads of sociological 
theory-makers since her time, and then, with her 
accustomed habit, swings over into an outlying 
realm of mysticism : 

Each creature holds an insular point in space; 
Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound. 
But all the multitudinous beings round 
In all the countless worlds with time and place 
For their conditions, down to the central base, 



The World of Mankind 125 

Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound, 

Life answering life across the vast profound, 

In full antiphony, by a common grace ? 

I think this sudden joyance which illumes 

A child's mouth sleeping, unaware may run 

From some soul newly loosened from earth's tombs: 

I think this passionate sigh, which half -begun 

I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes 

Of God's calm angel standing in the sun. 

Mrs. Browning would unite classes indeed, but not 
through any artificial means. 

You will not compass your poor ends 
Of barley-feeding and material ease. 
Without the poet's individualism 
To work your universal. It takes a soul 
To move a body, — it takes a high-souled man 
To move the masses, even to a cleaner sty: 
It takes the ideal, to blow an inch inside 
The dust of the actual : and your Fouriers failed, 
Because not poets enough to understand 
That life develops from within. 

"Lady Geraldine's Courtship" may be read by the 
side of the failure that Romney would have made 
had he carried on his plan. 

In the development of life lies the principle that 
shall unify society. In "The Poet's Vow" she 
emphasizes this thought still more. We are to 
"hold it in our constant ken" that 

God's own unity compresses 

(One into one) the human many. 
And that his everlastingness is 

The bond which is not loosed by any: 
That thou and I this law must keep. 



126 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

If not in love, in sorrow then, — 
Though smiling not like other men, 
Still, like them we must weep. 

In other words, our common experiences of sorrow 
should bind us together as a human family. In 
one of her letters she explains this: "I meant to 
express how that oneness of God 'in whom are all 
things,' produces a oneness or sympathy (sym- 
pathy being a tendency of many to become one) in 
all things. . . . The unity of God preserves a unity 
in men — that is, a perpetual sympathy between 
man and man. ... I believe the subject itself in- 
volves the necessity of some mysticism." 

The unifying element in the theory of evolution 
may have reconciled her to the unpleasantnesses 
of its aspect as the "Vestiges of Creation" had first 
presented it to her imagination; and we find that 
she begins, in 1854, to take the long evolutionary 
view to which since Darwin we have become ac- 
customed. If it takes seven men to make one 
pin, it may be possible that it will take 

Seven generations, haply, to this world, 
To right it visibly a finger's breadth. 
And mend its rents a little. 

The thought of it fills her with impatience: 

Oh, to storm 
And say, ' ' This world here is intolerable ; 
I will not eat this corn, nor drink this wine, 
Nor love this woman, flinging her my soul 
Without a bond for 't as a lover should. 



The World of Mankind 127 

Nor use the generous leave of happiness 
As not too good for using generously" — 

Nor 

stand and claim to have a life 
Beyond the bounds of the individual man, 
And raze all personal cloisters of the soul 
To build up public stores and magazines, 
As if God's creatures otherwise were lost, 
The builder surely saved by any means! 

But then she finds herself face to face with the 
theological enigma : 

To think, — I have a pattern on my nail, 
And I will carve the world new after it 
And solve so these hard social questions — nay. 
Impossible social questions, since their roots 
Strike deep in Evil's own existence here. 
Which God permits because the question's hard 
To abolish evil nor attaint free-will. 

While she was writing out these perplexities she 
should have recalled that ten years before she had 
said in the "Drama of Exile": 

I might say, 
That who despairs, acts; that who acts, connives 
With God's relations set in time and space; 
That who elects, assumes a something good 
Which God made possible; that who lives, obeys 
The law of a Life-maker. 

She should have remembered this! After all, try- 
ing to carve the world anew after a pattern on the 
nail, as Romney did, is not the way Christ in- 
tends, and Romney failed. Now at last, with 
blinded eyes, he sees that we must have 



128 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Fewer programs, we who have no prescience. 
Fewer systems, we who are held and do not hold. 
Less mapping out of masses to be saved, 
By nations or by sexes. Fourier's void. 
And Comte absurd, — and Cabet puerile. 
Subsist no rules of life outside of life, 
No perfect manners without Christian souls: 
The Christ Himself had been no Lawgiver 
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law. 

This IS the only socialism she knows — the spirit of 
love, the spirit of Christ, moving in the heart and 
unifying all that know and feel it. 

To reach this end Mrs. Browning has no better 
panacea and medium to propose than through the 
development of individual character. And on this 
point her teaching grew to have a very sturdy 
quality. In two of the later poems, " Lord Wal- 
ter's Wife" and " Bianca among the Nightingales," 
she shows that she believed with Robert Browning 
that to be afraid to do a great sin is one degree 
worse than to do the sin itself. And yet she speaks 
this stern warning: 

There's not a crime 
But takes its proper change out still in crime 
If once rung on the counter of this world : 
Let sinners look to it. 

God's method is individual, for saints as well as 

sinners, and no one can sit 

upon a high stool at a desk 
To keep God's books for Him in red and black, 
And feel by millions ! 



The World of Mankind 129 

Moral death is more than physical — 

For 'tis not in mere death that men die most, 
And, after our first girding of the loins 
In youth's fine linen and fair broidery 
To run up hill and meet the rising sun, 
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool. 
While others gird us with the violent bands 
Of social figments, feints, and formalisms, 
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up 
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts. 
Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world. 
Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross. 
God, set our feet low and our forehead high, 
And show us how a man was made to walk ! 

The supreme thing to be gained from human ex- 
perience is growth in character. "I wish to hve 
just as long as and no longer than to grow in the 
soul," she said in the last year of her earthly life. 

Therefore the only progress and happiness for 
the individual lies in satisfying the high demands 
of this exacting human soul and living out into ex- 
pression the God-life within. With the fulfillment 
of this possibility and in the light cast upon us by 
immortality, all the human relationships are in- 
tensified in their meaning and in their sweetness. 
The most precious thing in human relationships is 
God's blessing. Do not thousands know this bet- 
ter for having given a loving farewell in these 
words of hers .? 

God be with thee, my beloved, — God be with thee! 
Else alone thou goest forth, 
Thy face unto the north, 



130 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Moor and pleasance all around thee and beneath thee 

Looking equal in one snow; 
While I, who try to reach thee, 
Vainly follow, vainly follow 
With the farewell and the hollo, 
And cannot reach thee so. 
Alas, I can but teach thee! 
God be with thee, my beloved, — God be with thee! 

Love is the welding force of humanity, and '' love 
believeth all things": 

Whoso loves 
Believes the impossible; 

love "never faileth"; if it be love, it cannot die. 

God is too near above, the grave beneath. 

And all our moments breathe 
Too quick in mysteries of life and death, 

for such a word as "Loved Once"; 

The eternities avenge 
Affections light of range. 

To one who lives in the light of these revelations 

love becomes more than a rose-hued dalliance. 

Love's a virtue for heroes I — as white as the snow on high hills, 
And immortal as every great soul is that struggles, endures, 
and fulfills. 

Moreover, it would be better for us to love well 
something ill than to love some good thing but a 
little: 

Good love, howe'er ill-placed, 
Is better for a man's soul in the end 
Than if he loved ill what deserves love well. 
A pagan, kissing for a step of Pan 
The wild-goat's hoof-print on the loamy down, 



The World of Mankind 131 

Exceeds our modern thinker who turns back 
The strata . . . granite, limestone, coal, and clay. 
Concluding coldly with "Here's law! where's God?" 

The unification of all the loves of life, and so of 

all life, is in the love of God; the human loves are 

of little value if they do not lead us to that love. 

Fathers' love does this in its measure and helps us 

to understand Him: 

When fathers say "my child," 
'Tis easier to conceive the universe. 
And life's transitions down the steps of law. 

And if mothers' love is betrayed we may doubt the 

love of God also : 

'Tis simple that betrayal by mother's love 
Should bring despair of God's too; — 

that is, 'tis easy to understand how such a doubt 
could be harbored. 

After all, the experience of Mrs. Browning be- 
came in the end a well-rounded one, and we find 
that she gives her ''criticism of life" upon most of 
the fundamental things in human relationships. 
The relation of parent and child has a full com- 
mentary. That of father and child she touches 
rarely! — but upon child and mother the heart can 
be fully unloosed. It seems evident that such 
passages as the following can only have come from 
personal experiences: 

I felt a mother-want about the world, 

And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb, 



132 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Left out at night in shutting up the fold, — 

As restless as a nest-deserted bird 

Grown chill through something being away, though what 

It knows not. 

And this: 

The happy children come to us 

And look up in our faces; 
They ask us, ' ' Was it thus, and thus, 

When we were in their places?" 
We cannot speak; — we see anew 

The hills we used to live in, 
And feel our mother's smile press through 

The kisses she is giving. 

Elizabeth Barrett missed her mother since her very 
early childhood; but although we hear little of that 
mother in the biographies of the poet, it is evident 
that she preserved a most tender memory of her. 

Women know 
The way to rear up children (to be just), 
They know a simple, merry, tender knack 
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, 
And stringing pretty words that make no sense, 
And kissing full sense into empty words. 
Which things are corals to cut life upon. 
Although such trifles: children learn by such. 
Love's holy earnest in a pretty play 
And get not over-early solemnized. 
But seeing, as in a rose-bush. Love's Divine 
Which burns and hurts not, — not a single bloom, — 
Become aware and unafraid of Love. 
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well 
— Mine did, I know, — ^but still with heavier brains, 
And wills more consciously responsible, 
And not as wisely, since less foolishly; 
So mothers have God's license to be missed. 



The World of Mankind 133 

And when Elizabeth Barrett gave a lock of her 
hair to Robert Browning it was, she assured him 
in one of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," to 
find there 

pure, from all those years, 
The kiss my mother left here when she died. 

None could set a higher value on mother's love 

than she. 

'Tis simple that betrayal by mother's love 

Should bring despair of God's too. Yet be taught, 

He's better to us than many mothers are, 

And children cannot wander beyond reach 

Of the sweep of His white raiment. Touch and hold I 

And if you weep still, weep where John was laid 

While Jesus loved him. 

This passage seems to show that she had the rare 
wisdom to see that mother's love is not infallible, 
although in another mood she expresses the con- 
ventional view that it is. Or perhaps the use of 
the idea is here dramatic only. Aurora Leigh is 
speaking to Marian Erie when she says: 

" I thought a child was given to sanctify 
A woman, — set her in the sight of all 
The clear-eyed heavens, a chosen minister 
To do their business and lead spirits up 
The difficult blue heights. A woman lives, 
Not bettered, quickened toward the truth and good 
Through being a mother? . . . then she's none! although 
She damps her baby's cheeks by kissing them, 
As we kill roses." 

"Then she's none": that is, then she is no real, 



134 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

true mother — no mother in spirit and act. But 
many a woman is allowed by God to be legal 
mother who has not the first qualification for true 
spiritual motherhood. Yet legal motherhood ought 
to make mothers "low and wise." Aurora looked 
with longing eyes to the fate of the happy mother, 

With chubby children hanging on my neck 
To keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vines 
That bear such fruit are proud to stoop with it. 
The palm stands upright in a realm of sand. 

Aurora was that beautiful erect palm, but perhaps, 
after all, she would have chosen to be the bending 
vine. Once in the course of the story Aurora says, 

You shall not speak 
To a printing woman who has lost her place 
(The sweet safe corner of the household fire 
Behind the heads of children), compliments, 
As if she were a woman. 

In "Aurora Leigh" the struggle that goes on in 
the heroine's breast between the impulses of artist 
and of motherhood-desiring woman can but be 
typical of the thoughts and feelings that Mrs. 
Browning herself had known, and that perhaps all 
artists that are women can at least understand. 
This problem Mrs. Browning lets Aurora sum up 
when she says: 

Passioned to exalt 
The artist's instinct in me at the cost 
Of putting down the woman's, I forgot 



The World of Mankind 135 

No perfect artist is developed here 

From any imperfect woman. Flower from root, 

And spiritual from natural, grade by grade, 

In all our life. A handful of the earth 

To make God's image! the despised poor earth, 

The healthy, odorous earth, — I missed with it 

The divine Breath that blows the nostrils out 

To ineffable inflatus, — ay, the breath 

Which love is. Art is much, but Love is more. 

O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more! 

Art symbolizes heaven, but Love is God 

And makes heaven. 

From her earliest girlhood writing, the feeling 
for motherhood was strong in Elizabeth Barrett. 
United with her religious devotion, it produced 
that enhaloed poem, "The Virgin Mary to the 
Child Jesus," where angels unite with the divine 
mother to worship the Babe upon her lap. 

The slumber of his lips meseems to run 

Through my lips to mine heart, to all its shiftings 

Of sensual life, bringing contrariousness 

In a great calm. I feel I could lie down 

As Moses did, and die, — and then live most. 

I am 'ware of you, heavenly Presences, 

That stand with your peculiar light unlost, 

Each forehead with a high thought for a crown. 

Unsunned i' the sunshine! I am 'ware. Ye throw 

No shade against the wall 1 How motionless 

Ye round me with your living statuary, 

While through your whiteness, in and outwardly. 

Continual thoughts of God appear to go, 

Like light's soul in itself. I bear, I bear 

To look upon the dropt lids of your eyes, 

Though their external shining testifies 

To that beatitude within which were 

Enough to blast an eagle at his sun: 



136 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

I fall not on my sad clay face before ye, — 

I look on his. I know 
My spirit which dilateth with the woe 

Of his mortality, 

May well contain your glory. 

Yea, drop your lids more low. 
Ye are but fellow-worshipers with me\ 

Sleep, sleep, my worshiped One! 

The picture is rayed about with religious feeling, 
disarming criticism; technically it is, however, ro- 
mantic in treatment (besides being theologically 
mystical) — how could it be otherwise, with such a 
subject ? That other early poem about babyhood, 
"Isobel's Child," is even more so. Compared 
with the later child poems, it is rugged and arti- 
ficial, yet its very quaintness adds a stately grace 
to its form, as the faces of the hinds in the back- 
ground of some Holy Family make the simplicity 
of the Child's face still more sweet. The young 
poet sat in her room and thought about chil- 
dren and then wrote. To her gentle imagination 
children lay for the most part in soft slumber and 
let the angels whisper to them in their dreams. 
In "A Child Asleep" she says: 

Haply it is angel's duty. 

During slumber, shade by shade 

To fine down this childish beauty 
To the thing it must be made 

Ere the world shall bring it praises, or the 
tomb shall see it fade. 

There are two childhood scenes in the earlier 



The World of Mankind 137 

poems that have a wistful pathos. One is in 
"Isobel's Child" where comment is made upon 
the sleeping baby as it lies in the mother's lap : 

A solemn thing it is to me 

To look upon a babe that sleeps 

Wearing in its spirit-deeps 
The undeveloped mystery 

Of our Adam's taint and woe, 
Which, when they developed be. 

Will not let it slumber so; 
Lying new in life beneath 
The shadow of the coming death, 
With that soft, low, quiet breath. 

As if it felt the sun; 
Knowing all things by their blooms. 
Not their roots, yea, sun and sky 
Only by the warmth that comes 
Out of each, earth only by 

The pleasant hues that o'er it run, 
And human love by drops of sweet 

White nourishment still hanging round 

The little mouth so slumber-bound : — 

which makes one think of Aurora's memory of her 

childhood when she sat among the little creatures 

of the field 

In fellowship and mateship, as a child 
Feels equal still toward insect, beast, and bird. 
Before the Adam in him has foregone 
All privilege of Eden. 

The other notable childhood scene is in the 
"Drama of Exile" when Adam and Eve, expelled 
from Eden, stand looking down the avenues of 
the times-to-be and Eve perceives the " small hu- 



138 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

inanities " that are to be her human children. 
Each fragment in its way shows a profound in- 
sight. But the day of still stronger utterance 
came. She saw the children of the Ragged 
Schools, and she saw the "young, young" En- 
glish children, 

Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers 
In our happy Fatherland; 

she saw their young lives ground down in the 
English mines and machine-shops and factories, 
and their cry pierced to her heart. 

"For oh," say the children, "we are weary, 

And we cannot run or leap; 
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely 

To drop down in them and sleep. 
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping, 

We fall upon our faces, trying to go; 
And, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping. 

The reddest flower would look as pale as snow. 
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring 

Through the coal-dark, underground; 
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron 

In the factories, round and round." 

It was through the report to government by her 
friend Mr. Home that she heard the cry of the 
children. The report sleeps in the government 
archives; but Mrs. Browning's poem not only went 
forth as a trumpet blast to call the sleeping heart 
of England to feel and to reform, but it echoes 
still in many a land beyond the English isles to 



The World of Mankind 139 

touch the springs of action to issues of justice for 
childhood. 

It would indeed have seemed like a loss and 
misplacement of fate if a young woman who could 
write "The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus" and 
"A Child Asleep" should never have the joy of 
holding a child of her own in her arms, to place 

upon its brow a 

mother's kiss, 
Best thing that earthly is. 

That Elizabeth Barrett should recover physical 

vigor enough to enter into marriage and to bear a 

child seems a veritable miracle — and it seemed so 

to her. Later, in the blissful experiences of her 

own life, she knew all that motherhood could 

teach. And then she could write of babyhood 

such a description as this: 

There he lay upon his back, 
The yearling creature, warm and moist with life 
To the bottom of his dimples, — to the ends 
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face; 
For since he had been covered overmuch 
To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks 
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose 
The shepherd's heart-blood ebbed away into 
The faster for his love. And love was here 
As instant; in the pretty baby-mouth, 
Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked, 
The little naked feet, drawn up the way 
Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft 
And tender, — to the tiny holdfast hands. 
Which, closing on a finger into sleep, fj 
Had kept the mold of 't. 



140 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
And this: 

The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide, 

And, staring out at us with all their blue, 

As half perplexed between the angelhood 

He had been away to visit in his sleep, 

And our most mortal presence, gradually 

He saw his mother's face, accepting it 

In change for heaven itself with such a smile 

As might have well been learnt there, — never moved, 

But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy, 

So happy (half with her and half with heaven) 

He could not have the trouble to be stirred, 

But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said? 

As red and still indeed as any rose. 

That blows in all the silence of its leaves, 

Content in blowing to fulfill its life. 

And yet again this : 

While I, with shut eyes, smile and motion for 

The dewy kiss that's very sure to come 

From mouth and cheeks the whole child's face at once 

Dissolved on mine, — as if a nosegay burst 

Its string with the weight of roses overblown. 

And dropped upon me. Surely I should be glad. 

The little creature almost loves me now. 

And calls my name, "Alola," stripping off 

The r's like thorns, to make it smooth enough 

To take between his dainty, milk-fed lips, 

God love him! 

It was probably these passages that Swinburne had 
in mind when he said what is referred to in an 
earHer chapter in this book; and perhaps when one 
reads them, one must admit that perhaps the very 
essence of womanhood that seems to breathe from 
them comes more naturally from the hand and 



The World of Mankind 141 

heart of a woman than from those of a man 
however imaginative. 

The wonderful passage in "Casa Guidi Win- 
dows" beginning, 

The sun strikes, through the windows, up the floor; 
Stand out in it, my own young Florentine, 

Not two years old, and let me see thee more! — 

is not quoted here in full since it is so familiar to 
all. Casa Guidi in this inspired passage may 
stand for Florence, Florence for the world. 

Howe'er the uneasy world is vexed and wroth, 
Young children, lifted high on parent souls, 

Look round them with a smile upon the mouth, 
And take for music every bell that tolls ; 

(Who said we should be better if like these?) 

Such cheer I gather from thy smiling, Sweet! 

So children give to mothers strength and joy. 

Mothers are coadjutors of God, and can have a 

proof of the divine existence that others may not 

share. 

"And so I lived for him, and so he lives. 
And so I know, by this time, God lives too," 

said Marian Erie of her God-sent child. And the 
mother's love, the mother's joy, is something that 
can never be taken from her, no, not even if the 
beloved child passes on into the heavenly kingdom 
before the mother's weary steps can follow. 



142 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

"God lent him and takes him," you sigh; 

Nay, there let me break with your pain : 
God's generous in giving, say I, — 
And the thing which He gives, I deny 
That He ever can take back again. 

He gives what He gives. I appeal 

To all who bear babes — in the hour 
When the veil of the body we feel 
Rent around us, — while torments reveal 
The motherhood's advent in power, 

And the babe cries! — has each of us known 

By apocalypse (God being there 
Full in nature) the child is our own, 
Life of life, love of love, moan of moan, 
Through all changes, all times, everywhere. 



CHAPTER VII 

MAN AND WOMAN 

It was good that the first great poet voice to 
speak for womankind was so well-toned and so 
sweet. It was good that the voice had been dis- 
ciplined and modulated by the general experiences 
of the natural and normal woman — the comfort- 
able home in childhood surrounded by many 
brothers and sisters, and following that the wife- 
hood and motherhood; for any imperfection in 
these relationships might have altered the color of 
that voice and made it carry less far or pierce less 
deep. It was good, too, that the lower register 
of sorrow was added to the scope of the woman- 
poet's appeal; and how better could this have 
come than in just the ways it did — a worshiped 
brother's death, a father's tyranny, a delicacy of 
health that kept her for years face to face with 
the thought of death and in a familiar compan- 
ionship with the spirits of the "heavenlies." 
Everything seems to have been divinely educed 
and protected in order that the voice, when it 
came, should have the greatest weight with the 
world as the world was in Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning's century. 

143 



144 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

For these and many other reasons, no one 
could have been better qualified to speak of the 
problems of love than was Mrs. Browning. How 
she thought and felt in the earlier part of her 
life is written on the face of the *' Drama of 
Exile." Here we see Adam and Eve at the ex- 
tremity of the sword-glare outside the gate of 
Eden whence they have just been thrust. Eve 
is almost too exhausted by her grief to look up 
into Adam's face where the shadow is more to her 
than is the dim disappearing apex of those myri- 
ads of sad angels which shines high in the back- 
ground. She confesses she has been not his Eve, 
his life, but his death, his undoer, and begs him 
in justice to punish her: 

I do adjure you, put me straight away, 
Together with my name! Sweet, punish me! 
O Love, be just! 

But Adam makes answer, not in any spreading 
magniloquence, but all simply: 

My beloved. 
Mine Eve and life — I have no other name 
For thee or for the sun than what ye are, 
My utter life and light! If we have fallen, 
It is that we have sinned, — ^we : 

the sin is upon both, says Mrs. Browning's Adam; 
he says 

I am deepest in the guilt, 
If last in the transgression. 



Man and Woman 145 

He comforts her until it seems to her almost the 
voice of some saluting angel 

calling home 
My feet into the garden. 

Clasped in his arms, she is renewed. Adam prays, 

thanking Thee 
That rather Thou hast cast me out with her 
Than left me lorn of her in Paradise ; 

Because with hery I stand 
Upright, as far as can be in this fall, 
And look away from heaven which doth accuse, 
And look away from earth which doth convict, 
Into her face, and crown my discrowned brow 
Out of her love. 

And Eve, 

Because I comprehend 
This human love, I shall not be afraid 
Of any human death. 

Nov^ again it will be true what was said at the 
beginning, it is not good for man to be alone. And 
later, when at the strange power of the word 
"love" the cursing Lucifer fades away and disap- 
pears, they learn together the meaning and power of 
human affection. The close of day comes on. Eve 
would travel back to the accustomed places in the 
nearness of Eden, but Adam encourages and sus- 
tains her spirit as the symbolic zodiac visions come 
to test their souls. Then in the final vision Adam 
is commanded to bless the woman; it is his office, 



146 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

says Christ to him. Then follows that wonderful 
passage of about a hundred lines, which for lack of 
space we may not quote, but which must be com- 
mended to the mind and heart of every woman — 
and every man too — as an illuminated beatitude 
of womanhood; a vade mecum it ought to be, a 
sacred book-of-hours. 

It was a delicate and penetrating touch in this 
characterization of Eve where she hears the sound 
of life-to-be and realizes the "steep generations" 
as they are to pass " adown the visionary stairs of 



time." 



Shall I be mother of the coming life? 



she asks wistfully; and among all those phantasms 
of future beings that gather and pass before their 
eyes, those she would most long to have remain 
are the 

small humanities 
Which draw me tenderly across my fear, — 
Lesser and fainter than my womanhood, 
Or yet thy manhood — with strange innocence 
Set in the misty lines of head and hand. 

A womanly touch; and in answer to all the com- 
plainings of the Youthful Voices, the Poet's, the 
Philosophic, and the Revel Voices, it is always the 
Infant Voices that sing. 

Rock us softly. 
Lest it be all in vain. 

Certainly in a century and a half the Eve of poetry 



Man and Woman 147 

has changed; she has acquired a lovableness, a 
sweet reasonableness, and a power that her Mil- 
tonic prototype did not possess. The Adam too, 
how much more of a man he is! How much more 
we can respect him! Less starch and buckram he 
has, to be sure, but he is more human, more for 
the uses of the world. 

As time went on Mrs. Browning made many 
further studies of the problems of love in life. In 
"A Woman's Shortcomings" love is absolute, un- 
questioning. In "Isobel's Child" and in "Con- 
fessions" the failure of earthly love is depicted. 
"A Romance of the Ganges" is a tale of false 
human love — she has written little upon this phase. 
In "The Poet's Vow" she tries to show that the 
creature cannot isolate himself from his kind, and 
another phase — that creature cannot be sustained 
by creature — in "The Romaunt of Margret." 

On many points Mrs. Browning could speak 
where, had her own marriage been less happy, her 
lips would have been sealed. For instance, it 
would have been difficult for her to take a point 
of view toward the matter of marriage such as is 
touched in the following passage in "Aurora 
Leigh": 

Love, to him, was made 
A simple law-clause. If I married him, 
I should not dare to call my soul my own 
Which so he had bought and paid for : every thought 
And every heart-beat down there in the bill; 



148 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Not one found honestly deductible 
From any use that pleased him! He might cut 
My body into coins to give away 
Among his other paupers; change my sons, 
While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babes 
Or piteous foundlings; might unquestioned set 
My right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools, 
My left hand washing in the Public Baths, 
What time my angel of the Ideal stretched 
Both his to me in vain, I could not claim 
The poor right of a mouse in a trap, to squeal, 
And take so much as pity from myself. 

We have already noticed one arraignment of 

Romney Leigh; a second count against him was 

that he did not take the same standpoint toward 

the work and position of woman that Aurora 

did — in fact, did not beHeve at all in what were 

then held to be the advanced standards in regard 

to her position in the social fabric. He was one of 

those who did not see how a woman could pass to 

greater intellectual heights without interfering with 

her values as wife and mother — most precious 

values to the world, he thought, and not to be 

sacrificed at any cost, even at the cost of the 

woman's individual advancement and equality of 

position. And his view of marriage was the current 

one of the common law, that gave largest right to 

the husband. So it was that the socialistic side of 

his theories could smother the claim of his heart 

and make him hold that 

love's fool-paradise 
Is out of date, like Adam's, 



Man and Woman I49 

and theorize that 

to wed 
Requires less mutual love than common love 
For two together to bear out at once 
Upon the loveless many. 

Hence the utterly unpractical suggestion of a mar- 
riage of classes and masses through Romney and 
Marian Erie, a daughter of the lowliest poor. 

For a recluse, Mrs. Browning saw deeply into 
life as it was outside her invalid's door. Marriage 
among the better classes she saw to be to a great 
extent a matter of bargain- 
so much love accord for so much love, 
Rialto-prices. Are we therefore wrong? 
If marriage be a contract, look to it then. 
Contracting parties should be equal, just; 
But if, a simple fealty on one side, 
A mere religion,— right to give, is all. 
And certain brides of Europe duly ask 
To mount the pile as Indian widows do, 
The spices of their tender youth heaped up. 
The jewels of their gracious virtues worn, 
More gems, more glory,— to consume entire 
For a living husband: as the man's alive. 
Not dead, the woman's duty by so much 
Advanced in England beyond Hindostan. 

Very much the same point of view is taken in one 
of her letters where she noted that a German pro- 
fessor selects a wife who can merely stew prunes— 
not because stewing prunes and reading Proclus 
make a delightful harmony, but because he wants 
his prunes stewed for him and chooses to read 



150 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Proclus by himself. A fullness of sympathy, she 
continues, a sharing of life, one with another, is 
scarcely ever looked for except in a narrow and 
conventional sense. Men like to come home and 
find a blazing fire and a smiHng face and an hour 
of relaxation. Their serious thoughts and earnest 
aims in life, they like to keep on one side. And 
this is the carrying out of love and marriage al- 
most everywhere in the world — and this, she adds 
bitterly, the degrading of women by both. Yet she 
could say, and say it emphatically, that she con- 
sidered marriage the happiest state; and when a 
friend observed that she would walk like a pil- 
grim to the end of the world to find one who 
would love her and whom she could love, Mrs. 
Browning answered heartily, "That is the true 
feeling." The financial argument against mar- 
riage had little weight with her — her preaching as 
well as her practice showed this. In a discussion 
about one of Miss Mulock's heroes, who did not 
marry in the first volume because of a lack of in- 
come, she declared ardently that it ought rather 
to have been a matter of faith in God and in the 
value of God's gifts, "the greatest of which," she 
said, " is love." She continued : " A man's life does 
not develop rightly without marriage, and what is 
called an * improvident marriage' often appears to 
me a noble, righteous, and prudent act. Your 



Man and Woman 151 

Ninian was a man before he was a brother. I 
hold that he had no right to sacrifice a great 
spiritual good of his own to the worldly good of 
his family. ... I don't like to see noble Ninians 
crushed flat under family Juggernauts from what- 
ever heroic motives — not I." Again she gives this 
sound advice: "Be sure of him first and of your- 
self chiefly. For the rest I would marry . . . 
though the whole world spouted fire in my face. 
Marriage is a personal matter, be sure, and the 
wisest cannot judge for you. . . . People may live 
very cheaply and very happily if they are happy 
otherwise." 

Upon the so-called social question she also held 
strict views finding expression sometimes in im- 
passioned language. The respectable immorality 
of the "crooked world" which was 

always hard upon the rent 
In any sister's virtue! while they keep 
Their own so darned and patched with perfidy, 
That, though a rag itself, it looks as well 
Across a street, in balcony or coach, 
As any perfect stuff might, 

received no allowance at her hands. 

For my part, 
fd rather take the wind-side of the stews 
Than touch such women with my finger-end! 
They top the poor street-walker by their lie 
And look the better for being so much worse: 
The devil's most devilish when respectable. 



152 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Again she said: "War, war! It is terrible cer- 
tainly. But there are worse plagues, deeper griefs, 
dreader wounds than the physical. What of the 
fifty thousand wretched women of the city .? The 
silent writhing of them is to me more appalling 
than the roar of cannons." 

What is the cure ? For one thing, to let the facts 
be known and to face them. When Thackeray 
stained his record by refusing for the "Cornhill 
Magazine," of which he was editor at the time, to 
accept Mrs. Browning's "Lord Walter's Wife," 
with the excuse that the poem, though its moral 
was "pure, chaste, and right," would not be well 
received by his public, which was "squeamish," 
Mrs. Browning in a dignified and friendly letter 
wrote this: "I am deeply convinced that the cor- 
ruption of our society requires not shut doors and 
windows, but light and air; and that it is exactly 
because pure and prosperous women choose to ig- 
nore vice, that miserable women suffer wrong by 
it everywhere." 

Another remedial agency, she would certainly 
suggest, lies in the medium of education for women 
both high and low. It is natural to believe that 
Mrs. Browning held the most advanced views on 
this matter — advanced for her time, a time well 
before women had laid the ghost of impropriety 
that had stood at the drawbridge before they 



Man and Woman 153 

quietly stormed the citadel of the man's university 
and, walking sedately in, had seated themselves in 
feminine dignity within those impregnable walls. 
Perhaps this figure of speech is not faithful to the 
pioneers, but it will answer as a summing up. 
Mrs. Browning lived before that day; at the time 
of its dawn she was an exile from the land where 
it was brighter than in any other on that side of 
the Atlantic, and so could not take part in the 
labors and interests of those pioneers that she 
surely would have taken had she been at home, 
and besides she was at the time fired with passion 
for other great causes. A woman of great learning 
— as far as learning can be gained from an almost 
unlimited mastery of the world's library of books 
— of an insatiable avidity for knowledge, and of 
a sympathy wide enough to embrace the whole 
world, to be interested in its least fact and to feel 
its least sorrow, Mrs. Browning, just by existing 
and by being the woman she was, gave the greatest 
possible contribution to the cause of education for 
woman. In the typical features of her life she 
gave example and in the free expression of her 
genius she gave proof of the power of a woman. 
As to what the education of a woman still was 
in her day, she has a few bitter words to say. 
But she does not harp on it — she touches and 
passes by: 



154 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

A woman's always younger than a man 

At equal years, because she is disallowed 

Maturing by the outdoor sun and air, 

And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk. 

But she could not resist the ironic laugh that would 
come at the plans made in her day for the higher 
degree of the mature woman. Aurora Leigh runs 
over the course of study laid out for her by her 
English aunt. 

I learnt the collects and the catechism, 

The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice, 

The Articles, the Tracts, against the times 

(By no means Buona venture's "Prick of Love"), 

And various popular synopses of 

Inhuman doctrines never taught by John, 

Because she liked instructed piety. 

I learnt my complement of classic French 

(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism) 

And German also, since she liked a range 

Of liberal education, — tongues, not books. 

I learnt a little algebra, a little 

Of the mathematics, — ^brushed with extreme flounce 

The circle of the sciences, because 

She misliked women who are frivolous. 

I learnt the royal genealogies 

Of Oviedo, the internal laws 

Of the Burmese empire, — by how many feet 

Mount Chiraborazo outsoars Teneriffe, 

What navigable river joins itself 

To Lara, and what census of the year five 

Was taken at Klagenfurt, — ^because she liked 

A general insight into useful facts. 

I learnt much music, — such as would have been 

As quite impossible in Johnson's day 

As still it might be wished — fine sleights of hand 

And unimagined fingering, shuffling off 



Man and Woman 155 

The hearer's soul through hurricanes of notes 

To a noisy Tophet; and I drew . . . costumes 

From French engravings, nereids neatly draped 

(With smirks of simmering godship) : I washed in 

Landscapes from nature (rather say, washed out). 

I danced the polka and Cellarius, 

Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modeled flowers in wax, 

Because she liked accomplishments in girls. 

I read a score of books on womanhood 

To prove, if women do not think at all. 

They may teach thinking (to a maiden aunt 

Or else the author), — books that boldly assert 

Their right of comprehending husband's talk 

When not too deep, and even of answering 

With pretty "may it please you," or "so it is," — 

Their rapid insight and fine aptitude. 

Particular worth and general missionariness, 

As long as they keep quiet by the fire 

And never say "no" when the world says "ay," 

For this is fatal, — their angelic reach 

Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and dam. 

And fatten household sinners, — ^their, in brief, 

Potential faculty in everything 

Of abdicating power in it : she owned 

She liked a woman to be womanly. 

And English women, she thanked God and sighed 

(Some people always sigh in thanking God!), 

Were models to the universe. And last 

I learnt cross-stitch because she did not like 

To see me wear the night with empty hands 

A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdess 

Was something after all (the pastoral saints 

Be praised for 't), leaning lovelorn with pink eyes 

To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks; 

Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat 

So strangely similar to the tortoise shell 

Which slew the tragic poet. 

We may be sure that Mrs. Browning took a dis- 



156 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

tinct pleasure in writing that; but, though a de- 
voted lover of Tennyson, she did not enjoy "The 
Princess" when it came out; its implied under- 
estimate of women disappointed her; and she wrote 
to Miss Mitford : " What woman will tell the great 
poet that Mary Wollstonecraft herself never dreamt 
of setting up collegiate states, proctordoms, and the 
rest, which is a worn-out plaything in the hands 
of one sex already, and need not be transferred to 
be proved ridiculous ?" 

Yet, with all her claims for woman's rank in the 
intellectual world, Mrs. Browning cherished an 
intense dislike for the mannish woman, the wom- 
an's-rights woman, as her letters show, and, in 
those later days when all the world was coming to 
Florence to see if possible the Brownings, she 
would avoid meeting one of the strong-minded, 
even if necessary by persistent maneuvers. Her 
two sonnets on George Sand make this plain. 
Even more might be said. She did not even seem 
to mind it that her husband, if he pleased, might 
throw out of the window everything called hers, the 
moment after their marriage — interest and prin- 
cipal — but said calmly, "Why not?" and added, 
"Let what is mine be accepted as yours to the 
end." Again, she claimed that "there is a natural 
inferiority in the mind of woman — of the intellect 
— not by any means of the moral nature, and the 



Man and Woman 157 

history of art and of genius testifies to this fact 
openly"; which, though perhaps we ought not to 
say it, reminds us of Portia's speech to her pretty 
Bassanio just after he, with the psychological and 
logical assistance of her clever ritual of musical 
accompaniment, had chosen the right casket. The 
wonder is that Mrs. Browning, with all her keen 
sense of the ludicrous, did not herself see the humor 
of the statement when made by her. If she had 
had a less humble idea of her own genius she 
probably would not have missed seeing that. 

In her esprit de sexe, Mrs. Browning was not 
extravagant either way. She was not bigoted; she 
speaks of the "manly soul" of Charlotte Cushman 
— "manly, not masculine," she adds carefully; and 
she admitted that Miss Hosmer "emancipated the 
eccentric life of a perfectly 'emancipated female' 
from all shadow of blame by the purity of hers." 
As for herself, when she went to England she 
" packed eight thousand words" for herself "and 
eight thousand" for her husband, "besides seeing 
that they had shoes and stockings to go in and that 
Pennini's little trousers were creditably frilled and 
tucked." The letters show that this was typical. 
The humblest duties of the most conventional wife 
and mother she invariably laid upon herself as 
long as she lived. 

If Mrs. Browning could not endure a manly 



158 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

woman she had an equal detestation for a manly 
man, as the phrase is frequently understood. "I 
am not very fond of praising men by calling them 
*manly,'" she said. "I hate and detest a mascu- 
line man. Humanly bold, brave, direct" — ^yes; 
but a man who was "ashamed to be happy beside 
a cradle" was not approved by her. All of which 
reminds us of the lines in Tennyson's "Princess" 
where he admonishes us not only that the woman 
must be more of man, but also that the man shall 
be more of woman. The man who is all mascu- 
line strength,"without the complement of womanly 
refinement, is not the ideal of manhood in this 
woman-poet's eyes. 

Mrs. Browning's claim for woman seems a sim- 
ple one; she wished for her the right to work, and 
she wanted her work to be gauged justly, not as 
woman's work, but upon its own merits simply as 
work. "When I speak of women," she said, "I 
do not speak of them according to a separate pe- 
culiar and womanly standard, but according to the 
common standard of human nature." "I do not 
at all think that because a woman is a woman 
she is on that account to be spared the ordinary 
risks of the arena in literature or philosophy. . . . 
Logical chivalry would be still more radically de- 
basing to us than any other." And Aurora, in 
her tragic self-communings, says: 



Man and Woman 



159 



Shall I fail? 
The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, 
"Let no one be called happy till his death." 
To which I add, — Let no one till his death 
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work 
Until the day's out and the labor done, 
Then bring your gauges. If the day's work's scant, 
Why, call it scant; affect no compromise; 
And, in that we have nobly striven at least, 
Deal with us nobly, women though we be, 
And honor us with truth if not with praise. 

These principles Mrs. Browning applied to work in 
literature chiefly, for that was where she was most 
at home. "Men and women of letters are the 
first in the world to me," she said, "and I would 
rather be the least among them than ' dwell in 
the courts of princes.'" Yet, she wrote again, 
"rather perish every word / ever wrote, for one, 
than help to drag down an inch that standard of 
poetry, which, for the sake of humanity as well as 
literature, should be kept high." And one has but 
to recall the reviews of her early volumes — "an 
extraordinary volume as evidence of woman's gen- 
ius," "a remarkable performance for a woman," 
and so on — to realize how keenly she must have 
felt it when she wrote the following: 

You never can be satisfied with praise 

Which men give women when they judge a book 

Not as mere work but as mere woman's work. 

Expressing the comparative respect 

Which means the absolute scorn, "Oh, excellent. 

What grace, what facile turns, what fluent sweeps, 

What delicate discernment , , . almost thought! 



i6o Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

The book does honor to the sex, we hold. 
Among our female authors we make room 
For this fair writer, and congratulate 
The country that produces in these times 
Such women, competent to . . . spell!" 

The hour when she wrote that was a bitter one; 
but what a happiness would have been hers could 
she have foreseen that within a half century a man 
of letters would arise to write the following: "Mrs. 
Browning was a great poet, and not, as is idly and 
vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word 
'poetess' is bad English, and it conveys a particu- 
larly bad compliment. Nothing is more remark- 
able about Mrs. Browning's work than the absence 
of that namby-pamby elegance which the last two 
centuries demanded from lady writers."^ To have 
had one line of a thoroughly fair and disinterested 
treatment such as this would have given her great 
cheer. As it was, she was sometimes able to gird 
herself through faith in God for the encounter 
with adverse conditions. 

Be sure, no earnest work 
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak, 
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much, 
It is not gathered as a grain of sand 
To enlarge the sum of human action used 
For carrying out God's end. No creature works 
So ill, observe, that therefore he's cashiered. 
The honest, earnest man must stand and work. 



'G. K. Chesterton, Varied Types (1905), p. 261. 



Man and Woman i6i 

The woman also — otherwise she drops 
At once below the dignity of man, 
Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work. 
Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease. 

In the case of a woman who is an artist, Mrs. 
Browning thinks she sees a special difficulty. The 
artist, the poet, must generalize. Now, a woman 
is by nature an individualist. As a poet she must 
generalize; as woman she will persist in individual- 
izing. The warfare must go on within her. Is 
there not the same contrariety in the nature of 
every man who is also a poet ? Mrs. Browning 
thinks not — at least, the contrariety is not so keenly 
felt. 

We women are too apt to look to one. 
Which proves a certain impotence in art. 
We strain our natures at doing something great. 
Far less because it's something great to do. 
Than haply that we, so, commend ourselves 
As being not small, and more appreciable 
To some one friend. 

Perhaps this is true, and yet perhaps it is not 
always true. There was a man named Dante who 
"looked to one" and in him it did not prove a 
"certain impotence in art." Instead it brought an 
organization and centralization of art into one great 
blossoming white rose of love and beauty. In Mrs. 
Browning's castigations of her own sex — punish- 
ments we may believe to be intended for succeeding 
welfare — she generalized a little too swiftly. In 



i62 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

fact, a more full statement of the poet's duty and 
action is that he unites a process of generalization 
with one of individualizing and concretizing; and 
that neither is a matter of sex, after all, Mrs. 
Browning herself has done something toward de- 
monstrating. 

But whatever Mrs. Browning's theories were, 
in her life she illustrated and in her language she 
expressed what seems to us to be gloriously near 
to an ideal of the highest possible in the human 
pledge between man and woman. 

In his late hour of clarified vision it was given 
to Romney Leigh to have a glimpse of what the 
"love of wedded souls" may be. "First, God's 
love," said Aurora, and he answered, 

"And next, . . . the love of wedded souls, 
Which still presents that mystery's counterpart. 
Sweet shadow-rose, upon the water of life, 
Of such a mystic substance, Sharon gave 
A name to! human, vital, fructuous rose, 
Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves, 
Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbor-loves 
And civic — all fair petals, all good scents. 
All reddened, sweetened from one central Heart!" 

"That mystery's counterpart!" — ^that is, the im- 
age and symbol in human life of what God's love 
may be as it broods upon the world. What this 
may mean as a woman poet can interpret it we 
see everywhere in Mrs. Browning's poetry, but 



Man and Woman 163 

above all in that transfigured poem, the "Sonnets 
from the Portuguese"; for that is the name of a sin- 
gle poem — not of a collection of poems. It is one 
work, each stanza a rose in a chaplet of flowers. 
One single sweeping tide of emotion passes 
through these stanzas and welds them into perfect 
artistic unity. It is a lyric of love. The golden 
cord that binds the pearls into one chain is a slen- 
der thread of narrative, tenuous but definite. One 
may read the trembling first lines of this love story 
in a group of poems that are placed just before the 
"Sonnets" in the complete editions. These poems, 
that stand like an anteroom to a temple, are " Life 
and Love," "A Denial," "Proof and Disproof," 
" Inclusions," and " InsuflSciency." Then we take 
up the thread of the story itself, which we only 
need the love letters themselves to accentuate into 
electric clearness. She sits in her shadowed room 
and writes: (I) I thought, she says, that it was 
Death who stood awaiting me; I looked and lo, it 
was not Death, but Love! (H-V) But ah, I am 
too unworthy; to let thee love me, O princely 
Heart, would be to do thee a wrong; therefore go 
from me! (VI-VII) Yet if thou go, still hast thou 
changed for me my world, my life, my song! 
(VIII) And if I give nothing for the illumination 
thou hast given to me, shall I not be accounted 
ungrateful ^ Yet would it be right (IX) to give 



164 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

what I can give ? No, I must not! Yet I do love 
thee! And mere love itself (X) can glorify the 
unworthy. Therefore (XI) am I not all un- 
worthy. I will love thee even while I renounce. 
(XII) Yet even my worthiness came from thee, 
since thy love for me made me give love to thee! 
But, (XIII) let me show a dauntless, voiceless for- 
titude; let not one word of mine convey how much 
I love, how much I grieve. (XIV-XXV) At last 
thy love hath prevailed against my fears. And now 
(XXVI) all my visions come true in thee; and thy 
love (XXVII) hath lifted me from death. In ab- 
sence (XXVIII, XXIX) and in presence (XXX, 
XXXI) my fears are overcome by thy divine suf- 
ficiencies. I did fear because of the suddenness of 
thy love; but now I see (XXXII-XXXV) that a 
soul great enough can love greatly at a single 
stroke. (XXXVI) I did fear that this love would 
not last; now my faith is strong and serene. Yet 
let love be false rather than that thou shouldst lose 
one joy by keeping troth when love is cold. But 
oh, (XXXVII) pardon my doubts and fears! I 
take (XXXVIII) thy kiss of betrothal (XXXIX, 
XL) gratefully; — ^thou who art greater than all 
lovers of time past! (XLI) I thank all who have 
listened to my louder notes; but thou didst listen to 
the faintest — how can I thank thee ? And oh that 
I might speak my soul's full meaning to future 



Man and Woman 165 

years that they might give it voice and salute Love 
that endures, from Life that disappears! I leave 
my past behind (XLII); the future will be written 
anew in a love that is too deep and high and 
pure for all the days and ways of earth, and that 
after death will be only better and more perfect. 
(XLIII) For the flowers thou gavest, I give thee 
these flowers of verse; keep their colors true. Be- 
loved; their roots are in my soul. (XLIV). 

This is the framework; but what silver chain of 
thought can give any truthful impression of the 
globed pearls upon it! The wonderful sonnet- 
cycle cannot be quoted here; but, after all, why 
should it since this poem lies upon every table, is 
treasured in every heart ? If we should select, we 
should not know which to take, nor would the 
anthologies help us, since nearly every sonnet in 
the whole poem has been first or last chosen out as 
a world's favorite; but perhaps the forty-third is 
the one that will gather the largest number of 
suffrages, and it is the one that makes the highest 
sweep of the circle upon the heavenly arch, the one 
where the potency of human love presses its cer- 
tainty upon immortality: 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 



1 66 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

I love thee to the level of everyday's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; 

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 

I love thee with the passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath. 

Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death. 

The name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning has in 
this year of grace become a fireside thought. She 
has come intimately close to us; she has spoken 
our own word for us in two separate hours of hu- 
man experience — the two most essential and in- 
evitable passages known to us, the hour of uplifted 
religious aspiration and the hour of purest human 
love. And these two she has united into one, so 
raising each into a still higher place and moving 
us with them to a realm of possible attainment 
that had waited many a century for her to speak, 
and when she spoke knew itself for the first time. 

There are many traits in Mrs. Browning's poetry 
that show her kinship with the Elizabethans, as 
has been several times noted; and here is one in 
the "Sonnets" that is both Elizabethan and Pe- 
trarchan. The writers of the innumerable sonnet- 
cycles of the world's poetic past celebrated the 
beauty of their loves in verse that they gave solemn 
promise should to the honor of those lady-loves 



Man and Woman 167 

endure forever. Shakespeare did not escape this 
obsession of the sonneteer, nor did Sidney. But 
the motif fades away on the lyre of Mrs. Brown- 
ing to a faint strain and is transfigured into a 

melody of heaven. 

Oh, to shoot 
My soul's full meaning into future years, 

That they should lend it utterance, and salute 
Love that endures, from Life that disappears! 

The "Sonnets from the Portuguese" is not a 
story of human love that closes with the page of 
human death; it is a poem of "love that endures," 
that is to burn and glow forever along the im- 
mortal years. The poet's wish now comes true: 
she has sent her meaning into future years; and 
we, because of her, are more steadfastly able to 
"salute Love that endures, from Life that dis- 
appears." 



CHAPTER VIII 

PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS 

It seemed to Elizabeth Barrett Browning that 
her native England had 

A sweet familiar nature, stealing in, 

As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand 

Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so 

Of presence and affection, excellent 

For inner uses, from the things without. 

The description of a landscape or a scene in her 
native land had a lovingness in the very way of 
telling that is perfectly apparent in every touch. It 
evidently tastes sweet to her to speak of 

the ground's most gentle dimplement 
(As if God's finger touched but did not press 
In making England) , such an up and down 
Of verdure, — nothing too much up or down, 
A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky 
Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb; 
Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises, 
Fed full of noises by invisible streams; 
And open pastures where you scarcely tell 
White daisies from white dew, — at intervals 
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out 
Self-poised upon their prodigy o2 shade, — 
I thought my father's land was worthy too 
Of being my Shakespeare's. 

This from her Italian Aurora; and she makes 

1 68 



Patriotism and Politics 169 

Aurora confess that when the thrushes sang it 
shook her pulses; and when the hedgerows were 

all alive 
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies 
Which look as if the mayflower had caught life 
And palpitated forth upon the wind, 

she — standing "ankle-deep in EngHsh grass" — 
"leaped and clapped" her "hands, and called all 
very fair." Then she cried, 

"See! is God not with us on the earth?" 

In "The Romaunt of the Page" a greenwood in 
Palestine can but remind the hero 

o' the beechen-trees 
Which in our England wave, 
And of the little finches fine 
Which sang there. 

"Which in our England wave"! "Our Eng- 
land"! "Beloved England"! There was a deep- 
seated patriotism in the heart of the author of such 
lines. 

All the more did it hurt her in the depths of her 
nature if anything went wrong— as she saw the 
wrong — ^with her " beloved England." 

Now, by the verdure on thy thousand hills, 
Beloved England, doth the earth appear 
Quite good enough for men to overbear 
The will of God in, with rebellious wills! 

And her whole heart seemed to go out in the prayer, 

I would, my noble England, men might seek 
All crimson stains upon thy breast — ^not cheek. 



170 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

From her early youth Elizabeth Barrett took an 
eager interest in the public affairs of her own 
country. Two poems and a long passage in a 
third are her gift to the young Queen Victoria, and 
her prayer was, 

May the queen rejoice 
In the people's liberties! 

She had a keen ear for every word from London, 
whether it was about what Lord Melbourne had 
done or what the queen had said. "Do you ap- 
prove of Prince Albert V she asks one correspond- 
ent; and in her view of the Maynooth matter 
she shows a spirit of liberality which might per- 
haps not have been expected from one reared in 
so strictly sectarian a manner. Liberal in politics 
from the beginning, she was enthusiastic at the 
founding of the " Daily News," a paper which pro- 
posed an "ultraism at the right end," and which 
was to "help the people" and to "give a status to 
men of letters, socially and politically"; and she 
exhorted her friends to be good patriots and order 
that paper. The speeches of O'Connell she would 
not read, but kept her devotion, she said, for un- 
paid patriots. As early as 1841 she was finding 
serious fault with the English system. England's 
"fools," she said, "are lifted into chairs of state, 
her wise men waiting behind them, and her 
poets made Cinderellas of, and promoted into ac- 



Patriotism and Politics 171 

curate counters of pots and pans. . . . Everything" 
she adds, "■ ' is rotten in the state of Denmark.' " 
This, says Home, who quotes it, is probably the 
only attack on the government to be found in all 
her writings. One wonders what this early friend 
of hers would have said of the indictments in her 
later correspondence and the poems of her ma- 
turer years. 

But it must be said — and let this be the first and 
the most abiding impression — that nothing ever did 
or could uproot that native mother-country love. 
She maintained from first to last an intense in- 
terest in all the public aflTairs of state; and in her 
letters to England from the adopted home in Italy, 
the question ever was. And what is the general 
feeling now ? And as to Italy, the land that wooes 
all, why, 

Italy 
Is one thing, England one. 

To give up England, the "dear, dearest treasure 
of English love" — that would be impossible. 

But there were reasons why the poet, thinker, 
and woman was shut off to some extent from sym- 
pathy with English affairs and relationships. In 
the first place, the climate of her native land 
seemed to be murderous to her frail physique. She 
declared that she would rather face two or thiee 
revolutions than an east wind of an English winter. 



172 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

But the east wind was not the only thing. There 
was always an east wind for her in England — 
whether the sun shone or not — a moral east wind 
that was colder than any other. In fact, where 
love of country ought to be in the heart, there was 
in hers the mark of the burning iron, and the depth 
of the scar showed the depth of the root of it. So 
deep went the pain of that family separation that 
has been elsewhere referred to in this volume that 
she could only speak of certain ones as "the dead 
who live still." 

Then there were public criticisms she ventured to 
make. After comparisons in France and in Italy 
she could say: "We have some noble advantages 
over the rest of the world, but it is not all advan- 
tage. The shameful details of bribery, for in- 
stance, prove v^hat I have continually maintained, 
the nonrepresentativeness of our ^representative 
system'; and, socially speaking, we are much be- 
hindhand with most foreign peoples. Let us be 
proud in the right place, I say, not in the wrong." 
These feelings she voiced in the Prologue to "A 
Curse for a Nation," where she represents the poet 
as excusing herself from sending a reproof over the 
Western Sea on the ground that her own land was 
not free from blame. The poet says : 

My heart is sore 
For my own land's sins : for little feet 
Of children bleeding along the street : 



Patriotism and Politics 173 

For parked- up honors that gainsay 

The right of way: 
For almsgiving through a door that is 
Not open enough for two friends to kiss: 

For love of freedom which abates 

Beyond the Straits: 
For patriot virtue starved to vice on 
Self-praise, self-interest, and suspicion: 

For an oligarchic parliament, 

And bribes well-meant. 
What curse to another land assign, 
When heavy-souled for the sins of mine ? 

One wonders what may be meant by the words 
"bribes well-meant"; but the poet is speaking of 
her own native land, and that explains her shrink- 
ing from more explicit speech. The restraint is 
honoring to her heart, whatever the rumors were 
that helped to form the adverse judgment. 

But there was still another quarrel that Mrs. 
Browning felt she had with England. After Flor- 
ence had become a real home to her and Italy had 
been fully adopted into the heart, she longed for 
an advocacy of the Italian cause on the part of her 
native land which should be as passionate as her 
own. Disappointed in this, she had no patience 
with what seemed to her to be simply "doing a 
little dabblino; about constitutions and the like 
where there's nothing to risk." "Why," she asks, 
" does anyone say *God bless them' for it ! For my 
part," she cried, "/ never will forgive England the 



174 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

most damnable part she has taken on Italian af- 
fairs, never. The pitiful cry of 'invasion' is the 
continuation of that hound's cry, observe. Must 
we live and hear.?" 

These were the good and sufficient reasons that 
would have turned the thoughts of the really exiled 
poet more particularly to other countries than her 
own, even if she had not, from broad and generous 
impulses, been inclined to embrace the interests of 
those who stood outside of her own immediate 
circle. But her mind was perfectly elastic and 
could enlarge itself to inclose many nations. It 
was, in part, her great power of sympathy — that 
sympathy that we see running all through the 
whole story of Marian Erie — that led her to adopt 
even a foreign country as if it were her own. She 
looked upon each nation with which she came in 
contact, and in which therefore she was at once 
vitally interested, as a growing and developing 
thing, as a living creature whose education and 
progress she took the educationalist's delight in 
watching, and if possible in aiding. She adopted 
the attitude of the missionary. Her ideal of a na- 
tion's height in Christian civilization was formed. 
Her mind shaped out a plot of perfection by 
which it measured. She did this unconsciously, 
inevitably, irrevocably. Do the people under- 
stand 



Patriotism and Politics 175 

The serious sacred meaning and full use 
Of freedom for a nation? 

Feeling hers to be a voice — at least one — she holds 
herself responsible to the Great Justicers and must 
speak: 

O Magi of the east and of the west, 
Your incense, gold, and myrrh are excellent! — 

What gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest? 
Your hands have worked well : is your courage spent 

In handwork only? Have you nothing best, 
Which generous souls may perfect and present, 

And He shall thank the givers for ? no light 
Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor 

Who sit in darkness when it is not night? 
No cure for wicked children? Christ, — no cure! 

No help for women sobbing out of sight 
Because men made the laws? no brothel-lure 

Burnt out by popular lightnings? Hast thou found 
No remedy, my England, for such woes ? 

No outlet, Austria, for the scourged and bound. 
No entrance for the exiled ? no repose, 

Russia, for knouted Poles worked underground, 
And gentle ladies bleached among the snows? 

No mercy for the slave, America? 
No hope for Rome, free France, chivalric France? 

Alas, great nations have great shames, I say. 
No pity, O world, no tender utterance 

Of benediction, and prayers stretched this way 
For poor Italia, baffled by mischance? 

O gracious nations, give some ear to me! 
You all go to your Fair, and I am one 

Who at the roadside of humanity 
Beseech your alms, — God's justice to be done. 

So, prosper! 

Toward America Mrs. Browning had a feeling 



176 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

of gratitude, as did also her husband, and for the 
same reason, since both were accepted as poets by 
the American people before they were so received 
in their native land. The Americans were as good- 
natured to her as if they took her for the high 
radical she was, Mrs. Browning said. But the 
Brownings have not been the only British poets 
whose genius has been first recognized on this side 
of the dividing seas, and it was not her radical 
liberality that won to her the heart of America. 
Nor was it any paUiation on her part of the faults 
in mother-England's child-nation. In fact, Amer- 
ica caused the poet much anxiety, as a recalling of 
the events in the United States between 1850 and 
i860 will make all too plain. 

The author of "The Cry of the Children" 
could take but one position as to the inhumanity 
of the system of slavery. It is well known that the 
fortune of the Barrett family came from West 
Indian sources, and when in 1833 ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ 
passed that set free the slaves in those islands and 
made commercial changes disastrous to the in- 
terests of all whose income depended on slave la- 
bor, Elizabeth Barrett wrote: "The late bill ruined 
the West Indians. That is settled. The consterna- 
tion here is very great. Nevertheless I am glad, 
and always shall be, that the negroes are — virtually 
— free!" How sincerely and keenly she felt on 



Patriotism and Politics 177 

this subject is set down in a poem composed some 
years later called "The Runaway Slave at Pil- 
grim's Point," which was written at the request of 
some antislavery friends in America. Nobody 
would print it, she said, because she could not help 
making it bitter. If they did print it, she declared, 
she should think them more boldly in earnest than 
she fancied then that they were. And they did 
print it! In that poem, with an attempt at dra- 
matic contrast, she makes the runaway woman- 
slave stand 

on the mark beside the shore 
Of the first white pilgrim's bended knee. 
Where exile turned to ancestor, 
And God was thanked for liberty; 

and there the slave-woman cries back to the people 
the curses of the black race upon a nation that 
could hold them in slavery. These are the last 
three of the thirty-six stanzas : 

Whips, curses; these must answer those! 

For in this Union you have set 
Two kinds of men in adverse rows, 

Each loathing each; and all forget 
The seven wounds in Christ's body fair, 
While He sees gaping everyivhere 

Our countless wounds that pay no debt. 
Our wounds are different. Your white men 

Are, after all, not gods indeed, 
Nor able to make Christs again 

Do good with bleeding. We who bleed 
(Stand off!) we help not in our loss! 
We are too heavy for our cross, 

And fall and crush you and your seed. 



178 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

I fall, I swoon! I look at the sky. 

The clouds are breaking on my brain; 
I am floated along, as if I should die 

Of liberty's exquisite pain. 
In the name of the white child waiting for me 
In the death-dark where we may kiss and agree, 
White men, I leave you all curse-free 

In my broken heart's disdain! 

Again she put the love of her American friends 
to the test. The poem this time was "A Curse for 
a Nation." It was printed in i860 — need any- 
thing more be said ? The poem opens with a 
Prologue in which an angel commands the poet to 
speak: 

I heard an angel speak last night, 

And he said "Write! 
Write a Nation's curse for me, 
And send it over the Western Sea.'* 

I faltered, taking up the word : 

"Not so, my lord! 
If curses must be, choose another 
To send thy curse against my brother. 

vFor I am bound by gratitude, 

By love and blood. 
To brothers of mine across the sea. 
Who stretch out kindly hands to me." 

"Therefore," the voice said, "thou must write." 
And no other excuses were accepted, not her own 
land's sins, not her woman's weakness; for, said the 
angel, 

"A curse from the depths of womanhood 
Is very salt, and bitter, and good." 



Patriotism and Politics 179 

And so she was constrained to write the curse and 
send it over the Western Sea. 

Because ye have broken your own chain 

With the strain 
Of brave men climbing a Nation's height, 
Yet thence bear down with brand and thong 
On souls of others; 

because ye keep "footing on writhing bond-slaves," 
and "do the fiend's work perfectly in strangling 

martyrs" — 

This is the curse. Write. 

Then follows an arraignment which is like a scorch- 
ing heat to draw forth disease. It was an electric 
searchlight cast upon the future and penetrating 
into the realms of the spiritual progress and de- 
velopment of a nation until it reached the place 
where new shames and new contritions should arise 
and make new anguish of heart: 

Ye shall watch while kings conspire 
Round the people's smoldering fire 

And, warm for your part, 
Shall never dare — O shame! 
To utter the thought into flame 

Which burns at your heart. 

Ye shall watch while nations strive 
With the bloodhounds, die or survive 

Drop faint from their jaws. 
Or throttle them backward to death; 
And only under your breath 

Shall favor the cause. 



i8o Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Ye shall watch while strong men draw 
The nets of feudal law 

To strangle the weak; 
And, counting the sin for a sin, 
Your soul shall be sadder within 

Than the word ye shall speak. 

When good men are praying erect 
That Christ may avenge his elect 

And deliver the earth, 
The prayer in your ears, said low, 
Shall sound like the tramp of a foe 

That's driving you forth. 

When wise men give you their praise. 
They shall pause in the heat of the phrase, 

As if carried too far. 
When ye boast your own charters kept true, 
Ye shall blush; for the thing which ye do 

Derides what ye are. 

When fools cast taunts at your gate. 
Your scorn ye shall somewhat abate 

As ye look o'er the wall; 
For your conscience, tradition, and name 
Explode with a deadlier blame 

Than the worst of them all. 

Go, wherever ill deeds shall be done. 
Go, plant your flag in the sun 

Beside the ill-doers! 
And recoil from clenching the curse 
Of God's witnessing Universe 

With a curse of yours. 

This is the curse. Write. 

It must be said that to this day one reads these 
words with bated breath, and hides one's eyes 



Patriotism and Politics i8i 

from the mere splendor of their moral height. Who 
else sounded a warning like this ? Who else pre- 
dicted such a following and working out of effects, 
who else at that time saw into the future with such 
a precision ? No more perfect proof could be given 
of the power of the poet as seer than this one poem; 
and the fulfillment in some measure of the prophecy 
must be bitterly admitted even over the high banks 
and the smoking altars of repentance and expia- 
tion. Those most pregnant words, 

Shall never dare . . . 
To utter the thought into flame 
Which bums at your heart, — 

have not they been fulfilled in the literary and 
poetic dearth of the Southland ? Yes, the author 
of this "Curse for a Nation" must stand with her 
who wrote the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and with 
that other one who sang the Battle Hymn that 
flames with the passion of moral conquest, among 
the greatest of our great quickeners of the national 
conscience that lived and let their voices be heard 
just before the guns of Fort Sumter burst forth. 
Mrs. Browning lived to read an early volume of 
poems by Mrs. Howe and to become an admiring 
friend of Mrs. Stowe, but she did not live to see 
how much more "boldly in earnest" the American 
people were than she had dreamed of in 1847. To 
the end she was anxious. In December of i860 



1 82 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

she wrote: "If the North accepts such a com- 
promise as has been proposed, the nation perishes 
morally — ^which would be sadder than a mere dis- 
solution of the States, however sad. It is the dif- 
ference between the death of the soul and of the 
body." Again she said: "Not that I despair for 
America — God forbid ! If the North will be faith- 
ful to its conscience there will be only an increase 
of greatness after a few years, even though it may 
rain blood betwixt then and now." A few weeks 
later she wrote this: "I am anxious about the com- 
promise in the North. All other dangers are com- 
paratively null." Then, in April, 1861, but two 
months before her death, she said: "I fear they are 
not heroically strong on their legs on the moral 
question. I fear it much. If they can but hold up 
it will be noble." In the depths of their sorrow, 
Mrs. Browning's American friends could forgive 
the "Curse"; and the little doubt that went with 
her to the grave will be pardoned too when one 
remembers how dark was the sky in the year 1861. 
And it was all forgiven! In the "little thin slice 
of a wicked book," as she humorously called it, 
which contained the "Curse for a Nation," there 
was other matter which Mrs. Browning knew 
would not help her reputation in England, but in- 
stead would make people say, "It's mad, and bad, 
and sad"; although she knew that they ought to 



Patriotism and Politics 183 

** add that somebody did it who meant it, thought 
it, felt it, throbbed it out with heart and brain, and 
that she held it for truth in conscience and not in 
partisanship." In this spirit the poem on slavery 
was taken in the end. Mrs. Browning wrote to 
England: "That thin-skinned people the Ameri- 
cans exceed some of you in generosity, rendering 
thanks to reprovers of their ill deeds, and under- 
standing the pure love of the motive. . . . The na- 
tion is generous in these things and not 'thin- 
skinned.'" 

Mrs. Browning's many journeys in her later 
years through the more or less monarchical coun- 
tries of western Europe left her as radical a repub- 
lican as she had been in regard to the affairs of 
England and America. In France she stayed long 
enough to enter deeply into the life of the people; 
over the charm of Paris she waxed enthusiastic — 
that city so full of life that " it murmured of the 
intellectual fountain of youth forever and ever!" 
And everything in France had for her an interest 
only surpassed by that of her adopted home, Italy. 

Many years before she ever crossed the Channel 
her physician had recommended Napoleon First as 
a fit subject for poetry. It was on the occasion of 
the removal of the dust of the dead monarch. The 
young poet had shed many a tear over the fate of 
that Great Failure, and now wrote the poem called 



184 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

"Crowned and Buried." To many words about 
the glory and the curse and the problem in that 
magic name of Napoleon she also added this: 

I do not praise this man : the man was flawed 
For Adam — much more, Christ ! — his knee unbent, 
His hand unclean, his aspirations pent 
Within a sword-sweep — . . . 

... But whether 
The crowned Napoleon or the buried clay- 
Be worthier, I discern not : angels may. 

It seems evident that the great Napoleon was no 
hero of hers. Of the Citizen King she had a bet- 
ter opinion. He was a "right royal king." If 
France had borne more liberty, she said in October, 
1844, he would not have withheld it, and, for the 
rest, and in all truly royal qualities, he was the 
noblest king, according to her ideas, in Europe — 
the most royal king in the encouragement of arts 
and literature, and in the honoring of artists and 
men of letters. Let a young and unknown writer, 
she continued, accomplish a successful tragedy, 
and the next day he would sit at the king's table — 
not in a metaphor but face to face. "See how 
different the matter is at our court," she said some- 
what bitterly, "where the artists are shown up the 
back stairs, and where no poet (even by the back 
stairs) can penetrate, unless so fortunate as to be 
a banker also. What is the use of kings and queens 
in these days, except to encourage arts and letters ? 



Patriotism and Politics 185 

Really I cannot see. Anybody can hunt an otter 
out of a box — ^who has nerve enough." 

A trait like this would naturally attract the ad- 
miration of a poet, especially one who throughout 
life knew the necessity of the straitest economy in 
order to make ends meet. It was also a touch 
characteristic of Mrs. Browning, let it be said in 
passing, that when the matter of national endow- 
ments of poets came up in her correspondence, she 
should say, "What, and Carlyle unpensioned! 
Why, if we sate here in rags we wouldn't press in 
for an obolus before Belisarius!" 

Mrs. Browning had great faith in the French 
people. Their very faults seemed to her to arise 
from an excess of ideality and aspiration. 

This poet of the nations, who dreams on 

And wails on (while the household goes to wreck) 

Forever, after some ideal good, — 

yet she believed the French nation to be a great 
nation; it will right itself under some flag, white or 
red, she said. And it was even in August of 1848 
that she could say this. Mrs. Browning was in 
Paris at the time of the coup d'etat of December 2, 
1 85 1, and saw Louis Napoleon ride through one 
immense shout from the Carrousel to the Arc de 
I'Etoile. There was the army and the sun of 
Austerlitz, said she, and she thought it one of the 
grandest of sights; for he *'rode in the name of the 



1 86 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

people, after all." This is perhaps as good a 
summing up as could be made of her attitude 
toward Louis Napoleon; it was not an adop- 
tion of imperialism nor was it a " sycophancy of 
success." Taking her life as it is now so well 
known to the world, one must be accused of a 
high credulousness who sees other than the sin- 
cerest motive in her attitude on this matter. She 
believed France to be out and out the most demo- 
cratic government in Europe; and the representa- 
tive man in France, the incarnate republic, was 
Louis Napoleon. 

And if at last she sighs 
Her great soul up into a great man's face, 
To flush his temples out so gloriously 
That few dare carp at Cassar for being bald. 
What then? — this Cassar represents, not reigns, 
And is no despot, though twice absolute: 
This Head has all the people for a heart; 
This purple's lined with the democracy. 

Again in "Napoleon III in Italy," published in 
i860, she could still say a noble word for her 
hero : 

Autocrat? let them scoff, 

Who fail to comprehend 
That a ruler incarnate of 

The people must transcend 
All common king-born kings; 
These subterranean springs 
A sudden outlet winning 

Have special virtues to spend. 



Patriotism and Politics 187 



The people's blood runs through him, 
Dilates from head to foot, 
Creates him absolute, 
And from this great beginning 

Evokes a greater end 
To justify and renew him — 
Emperor 
Evermore. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE ADOPTED LAND 

The name of the French Napoleon brings us to 
Italy. If Mrs. Browning had a weakness for Paris 
she had a passion for Italy — that " land of all men's 
past," that "piercing silence of ecstatic graves"! 
She loved the double rose of those Italian moons, 
the issino and ino and sweet poise of vowels in the 
Italian speech; her heroine "smiled like Italy"; 
and when she wished to put into a lover's lips the 
sweetest words he could frame for the one beloved, 
she made him say the perfect name, "my Italy of 
women." 

As to Florence, she loved every cobweb and 
spider there; she loved the very stones of it, to say 
nothing of the cypresses and the river; Florence, 
she said, was her chimney corner where she could 
sulk and be happy. And it must be believed that 
the Italians fully reciprocated this affection. With 
the golden chain of her verse — "aureo anello" — 
she had united Italy and England — that land that, 
in the day of the southern nation's need, had car- 
ried her rifles so thick that she must spare them 
in the cause of a brother! And when the English 

woman-poet died, the remembering and grateful 

i88 



The Adopted Land 189 

Florentines asked leave to inscribe on Casa Guidi, 
the house where the two poets for so many years 
lived, the following inscription : 

qui scrisse e mori 
Elizabetta Barrett Browning 

CHE IN CUORE DI DONNA CONCILIAVA 
SCIENZA DI DOTTO E SPIRITO DI POETA 
E FECE DEL SUO VERSO AUREO ANELLO 

FRA Italia e Inghilterra 

PONE QUESTA LAPIDE 

FiRENZE GRATA 

1861^ 

Behind the rather forbidding exterior of that house 
in Florence on the wall of which this inscription 
hangs, beat the great heart of a poet who could 
feel the woes of Italy as if they were her own; who 
put into practice the words of her preaching to her 
own country and to the world — 

None fears for himself while he feels for another; 

and who gave, in effect, her life for her faith. 
Much was happening in Florence while they lived 
in that house, and silhouettes flashed out from 
those stirring times are found in "The Dance," "A 
Court Lady," "The Forced Recruit," "The King's 
Gift," "Parting Lovers," "Nature's Remorses," 
and elsewhere, every one being an impression rep- 

* Here lived and wrote | Elizabeth Barrett Browning | who in the 
heart of a woman united (reconciled, conciliated) | the learning of 
a scholar and the spirit of a poet | and made with her verse a 
golden chain | between Italy and England j Placed this stone | grate- 
ful Florence | 1861 



1 90 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

resenting a conviction in her, a word given out to 
get relief to her conscience and heart. In the 
preface to the volume of i860 which contained 
many of these poems, she said: "What I have 
written has simply been written because I love 
truth and justice, quand meme^ more than Plato 
and Plato's country, more than Dante and Dante's 
country, more even than Shakespeare and Shake- 
speare's country." 

If a country is the happiest when it has no his- 
tory, the great unhappiness of Italy during the 
years when the Brownings resided there together 
may be known by the amount of history that was 
made there during that time. It is not in this 
chapter possible to go into the international com- 
plications between 1844 and 1861, for the Italian 
map during those years wa^ a picture of inter- 
national parterres where the colors of Austria (a 
yellow that Mrs. Browning's baby scorned to touch 
with the toe of his little shoe), of France, of Tus- 
cany and Piedmont and the Papal realm, grew and 
flamed and kaleidoscopically changed from the Al- 
pine fringes down to the very tip of the boot. Mrs. 
Browning came to Florence in 1847, and in the 
first part of "Casa Guidi Windows" shows how 
immediately and fully she gave the "blessing of 
her soul" 

To this great cause of southern men who strive 
In God's name for man's rights, and shall not fail. 



The Adopted Land 191 

But the Italian people did not at first engage her 
full respect. They were attractive and delightful, 
but wanted stamina. Revolutions were too fre- 
quent, too ill-timed, too futile. Every now and 
then a day would be fixed for a revolution in Tus- 
cany, but a shower would put it off. One Sunday 
Florence was to be "sacked" by Leghorn, but a 
drizzle came and prevented. It was Grand Duke 
out, Grand Duke in; the bells in the church oppo- 
site Casa Guidi would ring for both. They planted 
a tree of liberty ("O bella!") close to her door and 
then they pulled it down. The same tune, sung 
under the windows, did for "Viva la republica!" 
and for "Viva Leopoldo!" "O heavens, how ig- 
noble it has all been!" she cried; "a revolution 
made by boys and vivas and unmade by boys and 
vivas — no, there was bloodshed in the unmaking — 
some horror and terror, but not so much patriotism 
and truth as could lift the blood from the kennel." 
On the whole, however, she was hopeful in 1848: 

Will, therefore, to be strong, thou Italy! 

Will to be noble ! Austrian Metternich 
Can fix no yoke unless the neck agree. 

Yet in a year's time she was to see the "Austrian 
boar rake up the grape and olive gardens" of 
Italy with "his tyrannous tusk and roll on the 
maize with all his swine." It was worse still to see 
the Austrian titles on the brow of the Grand 



192 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Duke Leopold. Then did her heart despair! 
The outburst of scorn and disgust in "An August 
Voice" shows what she felt at the suggestion that 
they should take back that Grand Duke! That 
"good, that excellent Grand Duke," she had called 
him; now he had nailed their flag to the mast and 
then softly scuttled the boat! 

As to Pio Nono, she deeply pitied him. She 
thought him a weak man with the noblest and 
most disinterested intentions; but she was to give 
up faith in him also. When the threat was sent 
to him that all in the Quirinal should be killed un- 
less he accepted their terms, he should have gone 
out to them, she said, and so died; but having 
missed that opportunity, nothing remained for him 
but flight. And in 1850 she came to the point 
where she could say that the only evident truth 
bright and strong enough to cling to was that the 
Papacy had forever lost its prestige and power over 
souls. In her pictures of the friars in the proces- 
sions that went by the windows of Casa Guidi, in 
"Christmas Gifts," in "A View across the Roman 
Campagna," and elsewhere, she gives her opinion 
in full upon this subject. If ever there was a holy 
cause, she thought, it was this; if ever there was a 
war on which one might ask God's blessing, it was 
this. After a while she began to see that the af- 
flictions of ten years were ripening the souls of the 



The Adopted Land 193 

Italian people. The elemental new springs of life 

were gushing everywhere. All internal jealousies 

came to an end, all suspicions were quenched, all 

selfish policies were dissolved. Florence forgot 

herself for Italy, and all seemed glad to sink their 

separate lives for the sake 
Of one sole Italy's living forever! 

Nobody any more could say that the Italians 
fought ill. Garibaldi had only volunteers, not 
trained troops; there was no such page of glory in 
the whole history of France; and then she paid to 
the "lion-heart" of their leader the tribute of a 
noble poem. Her faith in Napoleon III was per- 
fect; she looked upon him as a disinterested friend 
of a beautiful and unfortunate country, and hailed 
the tricolor as a symbol of noble rescue. She saw 
in dreams her Italy as a white-robed lady with a 
white mask on her head in the likeness of a crown. 
With this mystic woman she was walking on the 
mountains of the moon. She was hand in hand 
with a dream more beautiful than them all. The 
dream she shares with us in " Italy and the World," 
a poem that is one wave of oratory swept onward 
to the poetic plane. Florence, Bologna, Parma, 
Modena — you who are English, she cries, saw them 
as graves and thought there was naught to do but 
to sort your sables for their funerals; you who are 
English might mourn on sure and steady; the cock 



194 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

of France might crow, but that did not prove that it 
was the morning for resurrection; then, suddenly, 
the trumpet sounded and these graves were opened! 

Life and life and life ! agrope in 

The dusk of death, warm hands, stretched out 
For swords, proved more life still to hope in, 

Beyond and behind. Arise with a shout. 
Nation of Italy, slain and buried! 

Hill to hill and turret to turret 

Flashing the tricolor, — newly created 
Beautiful Italy, calm, unhurried, 

Rise heroic and renovated, 
Rise to the final restitution. 

Then the field of her vision is enlarged and she 
sees the beloved country as a leader of others, as 
a star of progress to the whole world: 

Rise; prefigure the grand solution 

Of earth's municipal, insular schisms, — 

Statesmen draping self-love's conclusion 
In cheap vernacular patriotisms. 

Unable to give up Judaea for Jesus. 

Bring us the higher example; release us 

Into the larger coming time : 
And into Christ's broad garment piece us 

Rags of virtue as poor as crime. 
National selfishness, civic vaunting. 

No more Greek nor Jew then, — taunting 

Nor taunted; — no more England nor France! 

But one confederate brotherhood planting 
One flag only, to mark the advance, 

Onward and upward, of all humanity. 



The Adopted Land 195 

For civilization perfected 

Is fully developed Christianity. 
"Measure the frontier," shall it be said, 

"Count the ships," in national vanity? 
— Count the nation'vS heart-beats sooner. 

Uplifted by these thoughts of what may be, she 
sees an almost millennial mission in the future of 
her Italy. 

Earth shall bless you, O noble emenders 

On egotist nations! Ye shall lead 
The plow of the world, and sow new splendors 

Into the furrow of things for seed, — 
Ever the richer for what ye have given. 

Then at last, 

Each Christian nation shall take upon her 
The law of the Christian man in vast: 

The crown of the getter shall fall to the donor, 
And last shall be first while first shall be last, 
And to love best shall still be, to reign unsurpassed. 

For months the poet moved exalted in the midst of 
such dreams. It seemed to her as if she walked 
among the angels of a new-created world. And 
then came the blow — the peace of Villafranca ! " It 
fell like a blow upon us all," she said, "and, for 
my part, you may still find on the ground splinters 
of my heart, if you look hard." 

Peace, peace, peace, do you say? 

What! — with the enemy's guns in our ears? 

she cried in "First News from Villafranca"; and 
it is not too much to say that the violent mental 



196 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

agitation, the reaction from a state of exultation 
and joy in which she had been walking among the 
stars for so many months, and the grief and 
anxiety, the struggle, the talking, all coming at a 
moment when the ferocious heat had made her 
body peculiarly susceptible, were the direct occa- 
sion if not the entire cause of the illness that led 
to her death/ One afternoon she went to the 
Trollopes, had sight of the famous Ducal orders 
about bombarding Florence, and came home to be 
ill. One long struggle with weakness followed, 
and continued to the end. She might have said 
with Giulio's lover: 



why 



Dear God! when Italy is one, 

Complete, content from bound to bound. 

Suppose, for my share, earth's undone 
By one grave in't — 

thus, of noble Italy 
We'll both be worthy! Let us show 

The future how we made her free. 
Not sparing life . . . , 

Nor this . . . this heartbreak! 

A volume of "Last Poems," published after her 
death, contained " King Victor Emanuel Entering 
Florence, April, i860," "The Sword of Castruccio 
Castracani," "Summing Up in Italy," and several 



iSee her letters to Mrs. Jameson of August 26, 1S59, and to Mrs. 
Martin of September, 1859, in Letters, ed. Kenyon, vol. i, pp. 
324-333- 



The Adopted Land 197 

others, all of which show how true to the end was 
her heart. To this, " Be witness, Cavour ! " Writ- 
ing on the day after the death of that statesman, 
she said: "I can scarcely command voice or hand 
to write Cavour. That great soul, which medi- 
tated and made Italy, has gone to the diviner coun- 
try. If tears or blood could have saved him, he 
should have had mine. . . . May God save Italy,'* 
she added. This was in the last letter of her re- 
corded correspondence and but twenty-two days 
before her death, which took place on the twenty- 
ninth of June, 1 86 1. 

During all the troublous years of their residence 
in Italy fear never drove them away from the city, 
and Mrs. Browning had a nearer touch with actual 
war than many a poet has had. In the volume of 
"Last Poems" her "Mother and Poet" sums 
up the case against war as a woman may. "O 
Christ," wept that mother of two sons slain at 
Ancona and Gaeta, 

O Christ of the five wounds, who look'dst through the dark 

To the face of thy mother! consider, I pray. 
How we common mothers stand desolate, mark, 

Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes turned away. 
And no last word to say! 

In "Parting Lovers" she gives another lesson even 
more forceful. It would not be like Mrs. Brown- 
ing not to hate war itself with a great hatred. We 
find that it was the one subject upon which she 



198 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

and her lover differed before their marriage — 
though one must believe there were many after- 
v^ard, else hovs^ could the marriage have been so 
ideally happy? In "Casa Guidi Windovs^s" she 
says: 

I, too, have loved peace, and from bole to bole 

Of immemorial undeciduous trees 
Would write, as lovers use upon a scroll. 

The holy name of Peace and set it high 
Where none could pluck it down. 

But then she adds forcefully: 

On trees, I say, — 
Not upon gibbets! — 

nor dungeons, nor chain-holts, nor starving homes! 
To her Tuscans she brings this high advice: 

Ye bring swords, 
My Tuscans? Ay, if wanted in this haze, 
Bring swords: but first bring souls! — bring thoughts and 
words, 
Unrusted by a tear of yesterday's, 
Yet awful by its wrong, — and cut these cords. 

Arbitrate if possible, she would have said; but 
after all war is not the worst thing that may be- 
fall, as a passage from a letter written in 1855 
shows clearly that she believed. There it is the 
silent writhing of the wretched poor in the peace- 
ful city that calls forth her pity. She was also to 
see the silent writhing of a whole people; but 
when there was made what she believed to be 



The Adopted Land 199 

a most unworthy and disgracing peace she cried 
aloud, 

Rather the raking of the guns across 

The world, and shrieks against Heaven's architrave — 

than such a peace! 

By Christ's own cross, 
And by this faint heart of my womanhood, 

Such things are better than a Peace that sits 
Beside a hearth in self-commended mood, 

And takes no thought how wind and rain by fits 
Are howling out of doors against the good 

Of the poor wanderer. 

This is not peace; 'tis a mere counterfeit; 

'tis treason, stiff with doom, — 
'Tis gagged despair and inarticulate wrong, — 

Annihilated Poland, stifled Rome, 
Dazed Naples, Hungary fainting 'neath the thong, 

And Austria wearing a smooth olive-leaf 
On her brute forehead, while her hoofs outpress 

The life from these Italian souls, in brief. 

And then she argues it out while the Austrian guns 
were pointing her way : 

Children use the fist 

Until they are of age to use the brain; 
And so we needed Caesars to assist 

Man's justice, and Napoleons to explain 
God's counsel, when a point was nearly missed. 

Until our generations should attain 
Christ's stature nearer. Not that we, alas. 

Attain already; but a single inch 
Will raise to look down on the swordsman's pass, 

As knightly Roland on the coward's flinch: 



200 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

And, after chloroform and ether-gas, 

We find out slowly what the bee and finch 
Have ready found, through Nature's lamp in each. 

How to our races we may justify 
Our individual claims and, as we reach 

Our own grapes, bend the top vines to supply 
The children's uses, — how to fill a breach 

With olive-branches, — how to quench a lie 
With truth, and smite a foe upon the cheek 

With Christ's most conquering kiss. Why, these are things 
Worth a great nation's finding, to prove weak 

The "glorious arms" of military kings. 
And so with wide embrace, my England, seek 

To stifle the bad heat and flickerings 
Of this world's false and nearly expended fire! 

Then a few lines further on she sends this mes- 
sage to her own native land : 

O my England, crease 
Thy purple with no alien agonies. 

No struggles toward encroachment, no vile war! 
Disband thy captains, change thy victories, 

Be henceforth prosperous as the angels are, 
Helping, not humbling, 

and thus find that peace is not a thing to be sought 
'Twixt the rifles' click and the rush of the ball, 

'Twixt the dying atheist's negative 
And God's Face — waiting, after all ! 



CHAPTER X 

ART AND LIFE 

What Mrs. Browning has said of artistic theory, 
and of the poet's character, mission, and message, 
would in itself make the basis of a large treatise; 
it cannot, however, be attempted here to do more 
than merely to touch upon the heavenward side of 
her artistic philosophy. 

From the days when as a little child she used to 
sit, doll in arms, in a corner against the wall, with 
eyes dreaming up to a high window of stained 
glass — as someone remembers seeing her — she 
was a dreamer and a lover of poetry. She wrote 
poetry — verses she calls it — at eight years old and 
earlier. At last this childhood fancy turned into a 
will and remained with her, and from that day on 
poetry was a distinct object with her, an object to 
read, think, and live for. After this unconscious 
decision she became resolute to work whatever 
faculty she had clear from imitations and conven- 
tionalism. After her great sorrow in the death of 
her brother she declared that a part of her was worn 
out; but the poetical part — that is, the love of 



202 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

poetry — was growing in her as freshly and as 
strongly as if it were watered every day. In 1841 
she wrote to Hugh Stuart Boyd that she cared as 
much for poetry as ever, and could not more. 

Her love for poetry was perfectly disinterested; 
poetry was rather a passion than an ambition to 
her, as it is with every real poet, and the gadfly 
which drove her along that road pricked deeper 
than an expectation of fame could do. She loved 
poetry better than she loved her own successes in 
it. She felt that she must have definite work and 
thought in poetry — "else I should perish," she 
said. So much for the necessity and desire and 
joy that drove her to her art. 

No one could, it seems, have claimed in mature 
thought more for poetry and the poets than did 
this first woman to be really great among them. 
She herself took the poet's mission as a holy chrism 
upon the brow. To her the poet's work was no 
light work. His wheat, she thought, will not grow 
without labor any more than other kinds of wheat, 
and she held that the sweat of the spirit's brow is 
wrung by a yet harder necessity. At an early 
point in her poetic career she reflects that the 
poetic fire is "one simple and intense element in 
human nature," having its source in the "divine 
mysteries of existence"; and she expresses her ar- 
dent belief in the "mystical effluence of poetry," 



Art and Life 203 

which she calls " a highest height over the highest 
height/' She tries to understand herself, to 
fathom this wonderful "effluence," this miracle of 
inspiration. But when in answer to Robert 
Browning's observation that "the more one sits 
and thinks over the creative process, the more it 
confirms itself as inspiration, nothing more nor 
less," she is not able to come any nearer to a 
definite statement than to say assentingly that she 
thinks the "creative process" to be "just inspira- 
tion and no less," and to add that our very inability 
to analyze the mental process is only a proof of 
the contention that it is from the divine. Then 
follows that impressive account of the creative 
process which all poets must acknowledge to be a 
description that comes home. She describes it as 
being a "gathering of light on light upon particu- 
lar points as you go (in composition) step by step, 
till you get intimately near to things and see them 
in a fullness and a clearness and an intense trust 
in the truth of them which you have not in any 
sunshine of noon (called real!) but which you have 
then." It is, in fact, to her mind, pure revelation. 
The poet is essentially the God-possessed man. If 
he is really "artist-born" he is born into a "round 
of crystal conscience," and has a religious passion 
in his soul. In a very special sense he stands in 
the place of God to men. 



204 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Why, God would tire of all his heavens, as soon 
As thou, O godlike, childlike poet, didst 
Of daily and nightly sights of sun and moon! 
And therefore hath He set thee in the midst 
Where men may hear thy wonder's ceaseless tune 
And praise his world forever, as thou bidst. 

Every part of the poet's activity is associated with 
that God-Hfe within the human casket. When a vi- 
sion comes to the poet it is as the " sweet slow inbreak 
of angels, whitening through the dim." And when 
this outer circumambient Hfe of vision and per- 
fectness presses through to the poet's soul, it is 
then that he speaks and bears witness to the real- 
ness of that higher sphere. This is what Mrs. 
Browning believed, and she could not account 
for the facts in any other way. 

Art's the witness of what Is 
Behind this show. If this world's show were all, 
Then imitation would be all in Art; 

but it is not; artists witness 

for God's 
Complete, consummate, undivided work. 

This world is a symbol of another, and artists, 
"whose spirit sense is somewhat cleared," may 
catch at something of the bloom and breath till 
people say "a man produced this" when they 
should say "'tis insight and he saw this." 

Thus is Art 
Self -magnified in magnifying a truth 
Which, fully recognized, would change the world 
And shift its morals; 



Art and Life 205 

if men could feel 

The spiritual significance burn through 
The hieroglyphic of material shows, 

all men were poets, and the millennium would be 
at hand! 

The soul of the artist is the reservoir and the 
standard-bearer of truth, and he speaks highest 
only when he expresses the realness of his inner 
self in the fullest degree. This was her theory. 
In a letter written in i860, the year before her 
death, she said: "If anything written by me has 
been recognized by you, the cause is that I have 
written not to please you or any critic, but the 
deepest truth out of my heart and head. I don't 
dream and then make a poem out of it. Art is not 
either all beauty or all use, it is essential truth that 
makes its way through beauty into use." Here 
she comes to the heart of the matter; and her own 
literary history exemplifies the dictum; for that 
poem of hers that came from the deepest depth of 
her own experience is the one read longest by 
the largest number of people, the one to be pub- 
lished over and over when its original copyright 
had expired by the largest number of publish- 
ers and to be treasured by the greatest number 
of people — and withal by those of the most di- 
verse tastes and most widely separated interests. 
It is not necessary to name the work — the "Son- 



2o6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

nets from the Portuguese," that purest and most 
perfect love-poem in any language. In this work 
Elizabeth Barrett dipped to the very source, the 
deep subterranean spring of her own heart. She 
did "look in her heart and write," as Sir Philip 
Sidney would have advised. And in a crystal 
goblet of delighting and almost absolutely flawless 
form, clear as clearness itself, and marked every- 
where with such a grace as perfectly sincere emo- 
tion can mold and evolve for itself when working 
through the poetically trained and practiced mind, 
she unconsciously made for the world a draft that 
was healthful and inspiring, a taste of something 
that the knowing world will not as yet leave off 
desiring — ^will not, perhaps, forever. Therefore as 
to their message, poets are 

the only truth-tellers now left to God, 
The only speakers of essential truth, 
Opposed to relative, comparative, 
And temporal truths ; the only holders by 
His sun-skirts, through conventional gray glooms; 
The only teachers who instruct mankind 
From just a shadow on a chamel wall 
To find man's veritable stature out 
Erect, sublime, — the measure of a man, 
And that's the measure of an angel, says 
The apostle. 

Compared with what poets have to say to us, lay- 
ing telegraphs, gauging railroads, reaping, dining, 
are not the imperative labor, after all. In fact she 



Art and Life 207 

in a measure takes from her conception of divine 
qualities to build her conception of the human 
poet and then enlarges this conception until she 
faces this "Great Perhaps." 

What if even God 
Were chiefly God by living out Himself 
To an individualism of the Infinite, 
Eterne, intense, profuse, — still throwing up 
The golden spray of multitudinous worlds 
In measure to the proclive weight and rush 
Of his inner nature, — the spontaneous love 
Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life? 

So again we find her reaching out her hand into 
the cool limbo of mysticism; and it seems certain 
that she would have gone further but that some 
stern milestones of Christian teaching led her feet 
in another direction. 

In accord with this conception of the poet's re- 
lation to the universe of God, standing almost as a 
spokesman for Him to the human race, she holds 
that the meaning of the world of nature ought to 
be well understood by him. Mrs. Browning does 
make this claim, and she calls upon the poet to 
render the meaning of nature and the universe 
plain to the world of laymen : 

There's not a flower of spring 
That dies ere June but vaunts itself allied 
By issue and symbol, by significance 
And correspondence, to that spirit- world 
Outside the limits of our space and time, 
Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice 
With human meanings. 



2o8 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

But Mrs. Browning, the recluse, is more likely 
to argue from poetry to the world of nature than 
from the world of nature to poetry. *^If poetry 
under any form be exhaustible/' she said, "Nature 
is; and if Nature is — ^we are near a blasphemy — I, 
for one, could not believe in the immortality of the 
soul." With her, whatever way the course of the 
argument was led,the step was upward and heaven- 
ward. The passage in " Aurora Leigh " (VI, 148- 
204) where Aurora contrasts the point of view of 
the scientist with that of the poet is interesting as 
showing the author's accurate philosophical analy- 
sis and also her appreciation of the scientist's point 
of view; her attitude is, in fact, one of especial 
courtesy to those holding a group of interests and 
talents respected by her intelligence though not 
preferred by her heart. The poet cares less for 
all nature than the scientist; less for the vast ag- 
gregations and for the one that represents the mass; 
but he cares infinitely more for the one fact, the 
one person, the one thing, considered quite by it- 
self and in its own individual being. She will not 
claim it as a strength that she would rather "track 
old Nilus to his silver roots," than "pore upon an 
ounce of common, ugly, human dust." Perhaps it 
is a weakness: she will profess it, anyway! The 
upshot of the argument is, however — one expects 
inevitably this conclusion from her — ^that the word 



Art and Life 209 

of the poet is more than the fact of the man of 
science. "Virtue's in the wotd!" But she does 
not go so far as to remember that the poet's word 
itself is a "fact" to the man of science and sub- 
ject to his analysis also. 

Then we come around to the practical use of the 
poet to the world. But 

plant a poet's word even, deep enough 
In any man's breast, looking presently 
For offshoots, you have done more for the man 
Than if you dressed him in a broadcloth coat 
And warmed his Sunday pottage at your fire. 

Here, then, the poet and the philanthropist meet. 

Art is much, but Love is more. 
O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more! 
Art symbolizes heaven, but Love is God 
And makes heaven. 

In spite of these almost haughty demands for the 
artist and his rank in the world's hierarchies, she 
claims also that he must place his feet upon the 
earth, not in the clouds. In the last words of 
Aurora to Romney before they resigned love and 
came to grief, she says : 

Reflect, if Art be in truth the higher life, 
You need the lower life to stand upon 
In order to reach up unto that higher; 
And none can stand a-tiptoe in the place 
He cannot stand in with two stable feet. 
Remember then ! — for Art's sake, hold your life. 



210 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
For 

What is art 
But life upon the larger scale, the higher, 
When, graduating up in a spiral line 
Of still expanding and ascending gyres, 
It pushes toward the intense significance 
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite ? 
Art's life, — and where we live, we suffer and toil. 

Yes, poets of the true stripe will be democratic 

and will be on terms of love with the whole world. 

Poets become such 
Through scorning nothing. You decry them for 
The good of beauty sung and taught by them. 
While they respect your practical partial good 
As being a part of beauty's self. . . . 
When God helps all the workers for his world, 
The singers shall have help of Him, not last. 

Naturally, then, this poet would claim all the uni- 
verse as unrestricted realm for her lawful working. 
"All truth and all beauty and all music belong to 
God — He is in all things; and in speaking of all, 
we speak of Him. In poetry, which includes all 
things, 'the diapason closeth full in God.' I would 
not lose a note of the lyre, and whatever He has 
included in His creation I take to be holy subject 
enough for me." Again she cries : " O poet, do you 
not know that poetry is not confined to the clipped 
alleys, no, nor to the blue tops of Parnassus hill ? 
Poetry is where we live and have our being — 
wherever God works and man understands." She 
distrusted the poet who could discern no character 



Art and Life 211 

nor glory in his times; her own faith in human 
kind was so profound that she could say, 

All actual heroes are essential men, 
And all men possible heroes. 

But it was the soul of man that interested her, not 
his external deeds and adventures. Therefore she 
was impatient with the "toys of simulated stature, 
face, and speech," found in the acted drama, and 
wished poets to 

take for a worthier stage the soul itself. 
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights, 
With all its grand orchestral silences 
To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds. 

It seems evident that she is here describing ex- 
actly what Robert Browning did exclusively and 
what she herself also did in large measure. Her 
earlier sketches of personalities stand outlined in 
tints that are only shadowy; the Onoras, and 
Berthas, and Geraldines, and other ladies of 
paynim lands and romantic earldoms. In this 
group, however, one must make exception of her 
Eve, a character which is like one of those ancient 
and perfect miniatures, done in silvery grays but 
distinct as one might imagine an angel would be 
against a background of full sunlight. But when 
we come to "Aurora Leigh" we enter a world of 
more distinct characterization. Aurora herself, 
the ample and mothering, the discriminating and 



212 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

yet passionate Aurora, who read Fourier and the 
other socialists, not, Hke Lady Waldemar, to gain 
a smattering to gild her conversation withal, but to 
find a reasonable channel for her overflowing pity 
— ^this wonderful woman stands as the consum- 
mate achievement of Mrs. Browning's dramatic 
presentation. Very subjective, to be sure, was this 
expression, yet the vision of Aurora that arises to 
our memory is not the slight figure of the poet 
herself, advancing from a shadowed couch draped 
with Indian shawls, and, as she reaches forth to 
us a pair of small "spirit" hands, giving a glimpse, 
between curls that shower down on either side of 
the face, of a pair of wonderful dark eyes full of 
lustrous welcome. No : the conception of Aurora 
is large and strong, quick to answer in witty re- 
partee (Mrs. Browning was full of fun, too, and 
her letters sometimes glitter with witticisms), but 
gliding instantly into tenderness and sympathy; 
moreover capable (as was Mrs. Browning, one need 
not say) of full and sweeping whirlwinds of holy 
indignation. It has been pointed out as a defect 
in Aurora that she was too hard upon that English 
aunt of hers; but it should be remembered that 
Aurora is represented as speaking from the stand- 
point of mature life — the time when she is writing 
out the story of her unhappy childish days of 
exile in the lonely English home — and, also, that 



Art and Life 213 

she has now imbibed those enlarging and strength- 
ening ideas of social equality. The characteriza- 
tion is all the more expert, technically, with this 
quality than it could have been without. The 
irony of the passage in the First Book, lines 297- 
309, is inimitable, and explains in full these con- 
flicting strains in the character of the two women. 
The portrait of that aunt is, in fact, a master- 
piece; so is also that of "this poor, good Romney," 
the idealizing, pig-headed Romney. Among per- 
sons somewhat less prominent in the story stands 
Lord Howe, who "set his virtues on so raised a 
shelf," he had to "mount a stool to get at them"; 
and Lady Howe, who was not proud — 

Not prouder than the swan is of the lake 
He has always swum in; 'tis her element; 
And so she takes it with a natural grace, 
Ignoring tadpoles. 

Then there is Lady Waldemar, conciliatory, flow- 
ery, and — rotten; "You know the sort of woman — 
brilliant and out of nature." And there was many 
a minor character silhouetted against the back- 
ground: Lucy Gresham, the sempstress, and the 
coarse woman that kept the house where she lived 
and died; Grimward the reporter with his "low 
carnivorous laugh"; Sir Blaise with the "top-attic 
head," and so on. And now and then a neat little 
picture is welded in somewhere, like that, for in- 



214 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

stance (in "Aurora Leigh," VII, 1239-56), of the 
Italian woman so old that "to kneel grew easier 
than to stand," who would surely "win a tern in 
Thursday's lottery" — one of those poor blind souls 
that "writhe toward heaven along the devil's trail." 
Her descriptions of slum life do not in general 
hold us as do those taken from the high-class 
realms to which this poet was more accustomed; 
they were less imaginably accurate. How could it 
be otheiwise ? Yet Marian Erie, though dis- 
tinctly of the realm out of which she came when 
she touched the life of Aurora, is even more appeal- 
ing than perhaps any other in the book. Marian 
Erie, in her gown of serge, was nowise beautiful; 
she had eyes that smiled remembering they had 
wept. She used "meek words that made no won- 
der of herself for being so sad a creature!" What 
other words could so perfectly have described that 
air of calm unresisting patience which we so often 
observe in the demeanor of the absolutely sup- 
pressed, that extinction of the sense of justice 
which should keep alive the feeling of revolt, that 
cessation of bitterness because of its very fruitless- 
ness! The story of Marian Erie, which lies at the 
base of the story of Romney and Aurora, is a 
romantic and a thrilling one, and through it the 
pure self of Marian shines everywhere with a pale 
sweetness. As she told to Aurora the tale of her 



Art and Life 215 

childhood and of Romney, "strong leaps of mean- 
ing" came in her "sudden eyes." At last Aurora 
saw that Marian Erie 

was beautiful. 
She stood there, still and pallid as a saint, 
Dilated, like a saint in ecstasy, 
As if the floating moonshine interposed 
Betwixt her foot and the earth, and raised her up 
To float upon it. 

Among the other characters to whom Mrs. 
Browning pays her respects in passing is a friend 
or two from the other side of the water: 

Delia Dobbs, the lecturer from "the States" 
Upon the "Woman's question"; — 

the name of this female being not only a bit 
of mischief, but also a true expression of her 
creator's dislike for the "Strong-minded." Better 
natured, perhaps, is her reference to the American 
girl, to whose delicate beauty Mrs. Browning was 
one of the first to give literary regard. Aurora 
sets down, in this life history of hers, Lord Howe's 
suggestion that he will bring to show off to her his 

transatlantic girl, with golden eyes, 
That draw you to her splendid whiteness as 
The pistil of a water-lily draws, 
Adust with gold. Those girls across the sea 
Are tyrannously pretty, — and I swore 
(She seemed to me an innocent, frank girl) 
To bring her to you for a woman's kiss. 



2i6 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

In some respects the characterization is even racial, 
if admittedly partial. 

In Mrs. Browning's latest group of poems the 
characterizations are more impressionistic but not 
less distinct. Teresita, "my Kate," Agnes, the 
"white rose," and the lover of Giulio; she who was 
"mother and poet" and passionate patriot; Lord 
Walter's wife, penetrating, acid, noble; the forced 
recruit whose musket had never been loaded; the 
Court Lady with her tawny hair and purple eyes, 
passing theatrically through the hospital wards 
— each character is individualized to the point of 
realism and the picture is etched in its outlines 
like the shadow of leaves upon the pavement. In 
all such pictures taken from the passing panorama 
of life it was the soul that interested the artist and 
made the picture worth while. In this her philoso- 
phy and her practice were one. 

'Tis impossible 
To get at men excepting through their souls, 
However open their carnivorous jaws; 
And poets get directlier at the soul 
Than any of your economists — for which 
You must not overlook the poet's work 
When scheming for the world's necessities. 

And again: 

Art's a service, — mark: 
A silver key is given to thy clasp. 
And thou shalt stand unwearied, night and day. 
And fix it in the hard, slow-turning wards, 
To open, so, that intermediate door 



Art and Life 217 

Betwixt the different planes of sensuous form 
And form insensuous, that inferior men 
May learn to feel on still through these to those, 
And bless thy ministration. 

Mrs. Browning sees her philosophy of life and its 
issues written large across the face of things, but 
it is seen through a medium of the artist's inspira- 
tion. It is, in fact, seen through a double medium. 
Not only must life be seen as a poet sees it, but it 
must be seen too as Christ sees it. She would 
work a union of the attitude of Christian and of 
poet in order to make a rightly balanced judgment 
upon the structure of society and the destiny of 
man.- If the reign of Christ in men's hearts could 
be established perfectly all men would look upon 
the world and its activities in the same way that 
the artist does, with the same wonder, the same 
ecstasy, the same single-mindedness. Then all 
action would be based upon justice and love, and 
divine law would be perfectly obeyed, because the 
divine life would take its place in all human re- 
lationships and activities. It was therefore a true 
expression of her whole philosophy when she made 
the Poet Voices in the "Drama of Exile" drift by 
upon these words : 

O we live, O we live — 
And this life that we conceive 
Is a noble thing and high, 
Which we climb up loftily 
To view God without a stain. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE POET'S MISSION 

In a volume of Christina Rossetti's poems Wil- 
liam Watson in 1884 wrote this quatrain: 

Songstress, in all times ended and begun 
Thy billowy-bosomed fellows are not three. 

Of those sweet peers the grass is green o'er one, 
And blue above the other is the sea. 

Judging by the echoes that have rippled along 
over the centuries from the voice of Sappho, one 
would think that she emphasized the love side of 
human life, while Christina Rossetti certainly gave 
most thought to religious aspiration. The third in 
this trio stood firmly upon the earth, yet dared to 
look into the face of heaven. The poem which 
will be her best chord in the orchestra of poets, the 
"Sonnets from the Portuguese," is not only a love 
story — though it is that and the loveliest ever writ- 
ten; it is a poem upon life, death, and immortality. 
It is a story of heaven upon earth and in heaven. 
That poem does not lose its hold upon the world 
as time goes on. In this the one-hundred-and- 
first year after her birth we find that myriads of 
publishers, great and small, are putting forth edi- 
tion after edition of the "Sonnets from the Portu- 

2l8 



The Poet's Mission 219 

guese." The poem is seen in all styles and at 
every price, from the dime booklet to the edition 
de luxe; and this means that it stands on the shelf 
in every home, however small, however rich; and 
that her pure and health-giving spirit is moving 
on in the progressive life of new generations. 

But the *' Sonnets from the Portuguese" is not 
the only work of hers that the people love. In a 
recent volume of the "Best Short Poems of the 
Nineteenth Century,'* compiled on the suffrages of 
a large number of poetry lovers, "A Musical In- 
strument," by Mrs. Browning, was the tenth in 
order in the list, and "A Court Lady" was the 
nineteenth. There were also two by Robert 
Browning, "Prospice" and "The Lost Leader." 
The list included twenty-two by men and three by 
women, the third in the latter class being "The 
Battle Hymn of the Republic," by Mrs, Julia Ward 
Howe. If the list had included "The Other 
World" or "Only a Year," by Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, it would have contained something from 
each of the three most influential women writers 
of the past century. There were two by Keats, 
four by Tennyson, three by Wordsworth, in the 
collection, and the other names included were 
these: Bourdillon, Bryant, Emerson, Holmes, 
Leigh Hunt, Kingsley, Newman, Poe, Shelley, 
Blanco White, and Wolfe. There was also a sup- 



220 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

plementary list which contained Mrs. Browning's 
"A Valediction" and "Crowned and Buried," to- 
gether with ten others by Browning. In this list 
also appeared the names of Longfellow, Whittier, 
Lowell, Coleridge, Byron, Landor, Watson, Ros- 
setti, Scott, and Swinburne. 

To a reader of her complete works it seems 
strange that "A Musical Instrument" and "A 
Court Lady" should have been the two poems 
taken for this list; "The Cry of the Children" 
and "The Sleep" would seem to have been 
better known. But this is a mere personal judg- 
ment. An examination of many English anthol- 
ogies, where she is, of course, always repre- 
sented, shows that different poems are nearly 
always selected by different critics. There is in her 
case, as in that of Robert Browning and many 
others of the greater poets, no one poem that 
stands so far above the others as to be invariably 
chosen. Representative expressions of taste like 
the above may be thought inconclusive, but a new 
valuation is due every half century or so to each 
poet of worth. At any rate, we of the twentieth 
century make judgment of ourselves by stating 
what we now think of those who have been valued 
in the past. 

Mrs. Browning had little conceit in regard to 
her own abilities, although her critical faculty was 



The Poet's Mission 221 

highly developed and her judgments upon her Ht- 
erary contemporaries time has proved to be al- 
most unerring. Her learning was almost vast. 
The list of books she read in literature, philosophy, 
and science is amazingly large. The v^orlds of the 
ancient classics were open to her as well as those 
of the French, German, Italian, Spanish, and 
other languages. She made also modest estimate 
of her powers as a poet — much to her disadvant- 
age as far as her early fame is concerned. In 1844 
in a sonnet called "The Soul's Expression" she 

wrote : 

With stammering lips and insufficient sound 
I strive and struggle to deliver right 
That music of my nature; 

and this image of the priestess possessed with a 
passion for expressing a message which she lacks 
power to breathe forth gave a suggestion to a long 
procession of her rapacious critics which inspired 
them through many a succeeding year. Yet in 
the year 1850, when Wordsworth's death left the 
laureateship vacant, Mrs. Browning had received 
sufficient appreciation from the world for her 
name to be urged for that post of honor by so 
influential a paper as the London Athenaeum, a 
suggestion that, judging by her letters, made but 
the merest ripple upon her calm. Still, amid the 
unfairness of criticism from which she nearly 
always suflFered, it must have been a comfort to 



222 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

her. It is only now — more than forty years after 
her death — that justice begins to be done to the 
prophetic modernness of her rhythms, and to the 
organic individuality of her selection in sounds and 
of her poetic grouping. But little did she really care 
for the critics. To possess the joy of creation was 
enough bliss for the poet — he should ask no other, 
she thought. All the vicissitudes of the literary 
life she and her poet-husband knew well, including 
poverty; but these did not count with her. God 
had given to her the divine faculty of the poet and 
the responsibility was upon her to show her grati- 
tude. To Robert Browning she said: "Remem- 
ber, as you owe your unscathed joy to God, you 
should pay it back to His world.'* And she took 
this advice home to herself. This was what she 
felt was to be done by her — to pay it back to His 
world. " If a poet be a poet, it is his business to 
work for the elevation and purification of the pub- 
lic mind.'' It is his business — yes; but it is also 
his joy. And so the army of poets will march 
singing around the walls and see them fall. The 
"fiery finger" of art will "pierce to the center," 

and break up ere long 
The serfdom of this world. 

Everything about the poet's work and the poet's 
inspirations was a matter of sacred mission to her. 
Even her rhymes were to her a question of con- 



The Poet's Mission 223 

science. Unbound by scholastic traditions, her 
ear-sense was unprejudiced, and she honestly 
thought that she could enlarge the capacity of 
English resources for poetic use by adopting as- 
sonances and free rhymes. Many people do not 
understand this. Many people think that she 
rhymed silence with islands and compresses with 
lastingness is because she did not know any better, 
or, worse still, because she had a defective ear. 
Neither was the case. If she had had the technical 
education as education has been in the schools of 
her time, she would have known that rhyme is a 
matter that goes down to the racial foundations of 
mankind and changeth not at the suggestion of any 
individual. To know the power of the swift cur- 
rent of a river where it runs between walls of rock, 
one must not only stand upon the cliffs and look; 
one must put in one's hand and feel the invisible 
compulsion. Mrs. Browning stood and looked, 
and pretty soon she saw her little shallop of a new 
idea come to grief — in fact, to ruin. She wept a 
tear or two, metaphorically speaking, and then not 
another. After that she gave to the world at the 
height of her powers an example of pure limpid 
measures vitally organized in the "Sonnets from 
the Portuguese," and in "Aurora Leigh" she an- 
nounces her very modern theory that form will be 
the outgrowth of the thought. 



224 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Trust the spirit. 
As sovran nature does, to make the form, 

says Aurora, 

For otherwise we only imprison spirit 
And not embody. Inward evermore 
To outward, — so in life, and so in art 
Which still is life. 

There was one ear at any rate to which the 
music of her poetry was "more various and ex- 
quisite than any modern writer's" — namely, Rob- 
ert Browning's. Perhaps this will be thought not 
to count, but the opinion was set down near the 
beginning of the first volume of the love-letters, in 
June, 1845, when their story was still in the friend- 
ship chapter. At a later date Browning said: "I 
am only a painstaking fellow. Can't you imagine 
a clever sort of angel who plots and plans and 
tries to build up something — he wants to make you 
see it as he sees it — shows you one point of view, 
then carries you off to another, hammering it into 
your head the way he wants you to understand; 
and while this bother is going on God Almighty 
turns you off a little star — that's the difference be- 
tween us. The true creative power is hers, not 
mine." It must be believed that Browning be- 
lieved this, and we love and honor him the more 
for it, and do not respect his judgment less though 
we may think he was wrong in this matter. Mrs. 
Browning was nearer to a true estimate when 



The Poet's Mission 225 

she thought her husband's powers to be greater 
than her own. She was one of the eariiest appre- 
ciaters of his genius; and he said of her, "Her 
glories shall never fade." And who shall say 
which was right ? A much longer time must 
elapse before a question like that can be decided, 
and perhaps it never can be settled. To-day the 
readers of Robert Browning are invincibly at- 
tached to him; but there are probably a thousand 
who read the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" to 
one who reads any one poem of his; and there 
will always be an audience, if perhaps a different 
one, for each. Ruskin, in that philanthropic Ap- 
pendix to the "Elements of Drawing," recom- 
mended the two Brownings among the poets best 
to know, and, with pardonable overpartiality, added 
that Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" was so far 
as he knew the greatest poem which the century 
had produced in any language. "It is of the 
greatest importance to you," he said, "not only 
for art's sake but for all kinds of sake, in these 
days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps 
of literature and live on a little rocky isle of your 
own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and 
good." To a parent or teacher, or to anyone in- 
terested in the growth of pure minds under the 
influence of pure literature, it is a comfort to know 
of such a little rocky isle with a spring and a lake 



226 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

pure and good to which one may lure away a 
friend or pupil; and certainly the author of the 
** Sonnets from the Portuguese'' is such an isle 
and lake. Sincere as a preraphaelite, though 
revolutionary as a "romanticist," Mrs. Browning 
is spiritual always in her theories of art as well as 
in her theories of life. As was said in an earlier 
chapter, she was a part of the great contemporary 
movement to respiritualize the church and the 
world. Her little life with its unequal physical 
sustainment was blown upon by divine fire, and 
then it became an illumination shining transfigured 
in the realm of poetry and nobly defiant for the 
claim of the soul's serious concerns to a place among 
the inspirations of the artist. She has been many 
times called a daughter of Shakespeare; if she de- 
serves this name she is sister also to Milton and 
to Dante: she must stand in the group of those 
poets to whose eyes the gates of heaven have stood 
open, who have looked within, and who have then 
reported to us something of what has thus been 
revealed to them. 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

1806, March 6. Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett bom at 
Kelloe, near Durham, England. 

1809-29. At Hope End, Ledbury, in the Malvern Hills. 

1 8 14. From eight years old on she is writing verse. 

1820. Fifty copies of her four-book epic, "The Battle of 
Marathon," published by her father. 

1824. It is thought that the injury to her back while trying 
to saddle her pony was received about this time. 

1826. "Essay on Mind with Other Poems" published anony- 
mously. 

1828. Death of her mother. 

1829-32. Financial trouble leads her father to leave Hope 
End. Residence for a time in Sidmouth. 

1833. "Prometheus Bound," translation, published with 
other poems, by the author of " Essay on Mind." 

1833, August. Act for a future and progressive emancipa- 
tion of slaves in the Colonies. This act became opera- 
tive in 1834. 

1835-46. Residence in London for the most part till her 
marriage. Period of settled invalidism. 

1838. "The Seraphim and Other Poems," by E. B. Barrett, 
published. First work published with her name. 

1838. Formation of the great friendships with John Kenyon, 
Mary Russell Mitford, Mrs. Jameson, and others. 

1840, July II. Death of her brother by drowning at Tor- 
quay, where they were staying for a time for her health. 

1839-45. Correspondence with Richard Hengist Home. 

1842. "The Greek Christian Poets" and the "Book of the 
Poets" published in London Athenaeum. 

1844. "Poems" by E. Barrett Barrett. First edition. 

1846, September 12. Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and 

Robert Browning. From then till her death residing at 

Florence, Italy, with summers in the hills of Italy and 

occasional visits to Rome, and to France and England. 

227 



228 Biographical Notes 

1 847. *' Sonnets from the Portuguese' ' first privately printed . 

1849. March 9. Birth of her son. 

1850. Second edition of her collected poems, containing a 
retranslation of the ** Prometheus Bound." 

1851. "Casa Guidi Windows" published. 
1857. "Aurora Leigh" published. 

1857. Death of her father. 
1859. Peace of Villafranca. 
i860. "Poems Before Congress" published. 

1 86 1. Jime 29. Death of Mrs, Browning at Florence. 

1862. "Last Poems," published by Robert Browning. 

1863. "Greek Christian Poets and the EngHsh Poets" (**The 
Book of the Poets") published by Robert Browning. 

1877. "Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning" published. 
1899. "Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning" published. 



INDEX 



Adam, character in "A Dra- 
ma of Exile," 36, 98, loi, 
102, no, III, 137, 144. 

145- 

Ador in "The Seraphim," 
13-80, lOI. 

^olian harp, 106. 

Albert, Prince, 170. 

America, 175-183. 

Angels, 31-34- 

"Appeal, The," 85. 

"Apprehension, An," 22, 

Artist's view of life, 119, 204. 

"Aurora Leigh," 18, 21, etc. 

Austria, 190-197. 

Bagni di Lucca, 107, 

Baptism, 11, 

Barrett, afterward Browning, 
Elizabeth Barrett, refer- 
ences to life of, 2-9, 103- 
107, 139, 171, 188-199, 201, 
227, 228; proposed for the 
laureateship, 221; person- 
ality, i-io, 17, 24, 46, 47, 
60, 81-83, 103, 157-159' 
170, 176, 182, 183, 189, 190, 
195, 201, 202, 220, 221, 
227, 228; influence of her 
life on the world, 6, 7, 223. 

"Battle Hymn of the Repub- 
lic," 181. 

"Battle of Marathon, The," 
227. 

Beauty, nature of, 97, 98, 
102 ; beauty and use in art, 
205. 

Bellosguardo, 61, 115. 

"Bianca among the Nightin- 
gales," 128. 

Blanc, L., 61. 

"Book of the Poets, The," 
25» 35. 227, 228. 



Bourdillon, P., 219. 

Boyd, Hugh Stuart,32, 43, 46. 

Browning, Robert, 3, 4, 5, 8, 
9, 12, 22, 24, 44, 57, 105, 
128, 133, 203, 210, 219, 
220, 222, 224, 225. 

Bryant, W. C, 219. 

Byron, C. G., 36, 220. 

Calderon, 25. 

Calvinism, 42. 

Carlyle, T., 185. 

Casa Guidi, 106, 189. 

"Casa Guidi Windows," 14, 
15. 39. 40, 100, 141, 175, 
190, 191, 198—200, 228. 

"Catarina to Camoens," 9, n. 

Cavour, 197. 

Chalmers, Dr., 10. 

Character development the 
social panacea, 128. 

Characterizations, 211. 

Chaucer, 25. 

Chesterton, G. K., 160. 

"Child Asleep, A," 136, 139. 

"Child's Grave at Florence, 
A," 26. 

"Child's Thought of God, A," 
52. 

Childhood, 19, 47, 48, 136, 
138, 139-142, 146. 

"Choir Invisible," 120. 

Christ, 10, II, 12, 13, 32, 33, 
99, 120, 127, 128, 146; his 
human life, 69, 71, 8;^, 84, 
86; his divinity, 16, 17, 66, 
73, 87-90; his death, 73-81, 
100; his second coming, 91 ; 
in "Paradise Regained," 8^; 
as a medium, 66; as fulfill- 
ment of artist's ideal, 217. 

Church, the, 9, 14, 17; ar- 
raignment of, 15; ortho- 



229 



230 



Index 



doxy, 9; nonsectarianism, 
12, 15, 91; growth in liber- 
ality, II, 12, 16; a dessent- 
er, 9, 11; faults of, 13; 
domination of church, 15, 
16; Roman Catholic, 16; 
ritualism, 11. 

Clairvoyance, 64. 

Coleridge, S. T., 220. 

"Confessions," 147. 

"Court Lady, A," 189, 216, 
219, 220. 

"Crowned and Buried," 184, 
220. 

"Cry of the Children, The," 
31, 138, 176, 220. 

"Cry of the Human, The," 
26, 89, 132. 

"Curse for a Nation, A," 172, 
178-182. 

Cushman, C, 157. 

"Daily News," 170. 
"Dance, The," 189. 
Dante, 25, 161, 190, 226. 
Death, 29, 64, 88, 89. 
"Denial, A," 163. 
"De Profundis," 8, 21, 43, 88. 
Descriptions, 111-116. 
"Deserted Garden, The, "103. 
Dickens, C, 60. 
Drama, the acted, 211. 
"Drama of Exile, A," 33-38, 

41, 42, 82, 88, 94, 96-99, 

loi, 102, no, III, 127, 

i37» 144-146, 217. 
"Earth," 85. 
"Earth and her Praisers," 

38, 94. 
Eliot, George, 120. 
Emerson, R. W., 219. 
England, 168-175, 193. 
Erie, Marian, in "Aurora 

Leigh," 48, 133, 141, 174, 

214, 215. 
"Essay on Mind," 227. 
Eve, character in "A Drama 

of Exile," 36, 97, loi, 102, 

III, 137, 144-147, 211. 



Evil, existence of, 35, 37, 38, 

48, 102, 127, 137, 
Evolution, 99, 100, 126. 
"Finite and Infinite," 50. 
"First News from Villa- 

franca," 195, 200. 
Florence, 60, 61, 115, 141, 

173, 188-195. 
Flush, her dog, 56, 104, 106. 
"Forced Recruit, The," 189. 
Foreordination, 46, 47. 
France, 172, 183, 185. 
"Futurity," 27, 28. 
Gabriel in "A Drama of Ex- 
ile," 36, 96, 100. 
Gaeta, 197. 
Galileo, 61. 
Garibaldi, G., 193. 
God, nature of, 20-31, 48, 

86, 87, 93, 128, 210. 
"Greek Christian Poets, Some 

Account of the," 25, 227, 

228. 
Hades, 51. 
"Hector in the Garden," 103, 

117. 
Heine, H., 21. 
" Hiram Powers' Greek 

Slave," 112. 
Holmes, O. W., 219. 
Holy Spirit, 10. 
Home, R. H., 20, 171, 227. 
Howe, J. W., 181, 219. 
"Human Life's Mystery," 52. 
Human love, 11, 131, 147. 
Hunt, Leigh, 219. 
"Idols," 85. 

"Idylls of the King," no. 
"Image of God, The," 85. 
Immortality, 25, 26, 28, 64^ 

106, 167. 
"Inclusions," 163. 
"Insufficiency," 163. 
"Island, An," 103, 104, 115. 
"Isobel's Child," 26, 27, 31, 

37, 49, 116, 136, 147. 
Italy, 5, 106, 108, 171-174, 

183, 188-195. 



Index 



231 



"Italy and the World," 91, 
189, 193-195- 

Jameson, Mrs., 6, 55, 99, 196, 
n., 227. 

Keats, J., 219. 

Kenyon, J., 227. 

"King Victor Emanuel En- 
tering Florence, April, 
i860," 196. 

Kingsley, C, 219. 

"Kubla Khan," 115. 

"Lady Geraldine's Court- 
ship," 125, 211. 

"Lady of Shalott," 117. 

Landor, W. S., 220. 

"Lay of the Brown Rosary, 
The," 41, 112, 211. 

Leigh, Aurora, character in 
"AuroraLeigh,"47,99,io7, 
114, 115, 118, 122, 132- 
134, 148, 154, 158, 162, 
168, 208, 209, 211-213, 
223. 

Leigh, Romney, 66, 99, 118, 
121-123, 127, 148, 149, 
162, 209, 213. 

"Life and Love," 163. 

Literary people, 184, 185. 

Longfellow, H, W., 220. 

"Look, The," 71. 

"Lord Walter's Wife," 26, 
128, 130, 216. 

Lord's Supper, 11. 

"Lost Bower, The," 103, no, 
112, 115, 1 16. 

"Lotos Eaters," 115. 

"Loved Once," 130. 

Lowell, J. R., 220. 

Lucifer, in "A Drama of Ex- 
ile," 35. 97. 100. 145- 

Maeterlinck, 109, 112. 

Marriage, 148-151. 

Martin, Mrs. J., 196, n. 

Martineau, H., 54, 106. 

Materialism, 66, 67, 95. 

"Maud," Tennyson's, 113. 

Maynooth, 170. 

"Meaning of the Look, The," 
71. 



"Measure, The" (Hymn III), 
84. 

"Mediator, The " (Hymn II), 
84. 

"Memory and Hope," 71. 

Meredith, G., 18, 34, 106. 

Mesmerism, 54. 

Milton, J., 36, 82, 100, 226. 

Mitford, M. R., 29, 156, 227, 

Moral law, 128. 

"Mother and Poet," 197, 216. 

Motherhood, 131, 132-142. 

Mulock, Miss, 150. 

"Musical Instrument, A," 
219, 220. 

Mysticism, 46-60, 96, 99, 100, 
207. 

Napoleon Buonaparte (Na- 
poleon I), 183. 

Napoleon, Louis (Napoleon 
III), 185, 186, 193. 

"Napoleon III in Italy," 186. 

Nature, 93-116; as ambassa- 
dor for God, 93 ; as symbol, 
96; in Italy, 106, 107. 

"Nature's Remorses," 189. 

Newman, J. H., 18, 219. 

Optimism, 91, 94. 

"Parting Lovers," 189, 196, 
197, 216. 

Patriotism, 1 68-1 71. 

Poet, the, and poetry, 201- 
226; the poet a God-pos- 
sessed man, 203; serious- 
ness and nobility of his 
work, 202, 203, 222, 226; 
poetry comes by inspira- 
tion, 203, 204; the poet a 
spokesman for God, 207; 
relation of, to nature, 208; 
to science, 208; to democ- 
racy, 210; technique of, 
116, 222, 223; use of, to 
the world, 209, 

"Poet, The," 93, 204. 

"Poet's Vow, The," 38, 71, 
72, 125, 147. 

Prayer, 40. 

Preraphaelites, 49, 113, 225. 



232 



Index 



"Princess," Tennyson's, 158. 

"Prometheus Bound," 85, 
227, 228. 

"Proof and Disproof," 163. 

Resurrection of body, 30. 

"Rhapsody of Life's Progress, 
A," 44, 51, 52, 124. ' 

"Romance of the Ganges, A," 
147- 

"Romauntof Margret, The," 
112, 116, 147. 

"Romaunt of the Page, The," 
169. 

Rossetti, C, 218. 

Rossetti, D, G., 18, 49, 220. 

"Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's 
Point, The," 176, 177. 

Ruskin, J., 46, 58, 113,118, 
225. 

St. Peter's at Rome, 16. 

Sand, George, 156. 

Sappho, 218. 

Scott, Sir W., 220. 

"Seraphim, The," 32-34, 41, 
50, 73-82, 100, no, 227. 

Shakespeare, 167, 226. 

Shelley, P. B., 20, 219. 

Sidney, 167, 206. 

Sin, nature and effects of , 10 1. 

"Since without Thee we do 
no good," 85. 

Slavery, 176-183, 227. 

"Sleep, The," 220. 

Social question, i'5i-i53. 

Socialism, 60, 123-129. 

"Song for the Ragged Schools 
of London, A," 138. 

"Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese," I, 8, 133, 163-167, 
206, 218, 219, 223, 228. 

"Soul's Traveling, The," 87. 

"Sounds," 39, 51, 109, no. 

Spiritualism, 59, 61, 63, etc.; 
phenomena confirmatory 
of revelation, 66; failure of 
her hope in the investiga- 
tions, 65-68. 

"Stabat Mater," 70. 

Stowe, H. B., 181, 219. 



"Summing Up in Italy," 196. 
"Supplication for Love, A" 

(Hymn I), 50, 92. 
Swedenborgianism, 54, 57. 
Swinburne, A. C, 18, 19, 106, 

140, 220. 
"Sword of Castruccio Castra- 

cani. The," 196. 
Tennyson, A., 29, 115, 158, 

219. 
Thackeray, W. M., 152. 
' 'Thought for a Lonely Death- 
bed, A," 86. 
TroUope, A., 196. 
Tuscany, 190, 198. 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 181. 
"Valediction, A," 129, 220. 
"Vestiges of Creation," 99, 

126. 
Victor Emanuel, 196. 
Victoria, Queen, 170. 
Villafranca, 195, 228. 
"Virgin Mary to the Child 

Jesus, The," ;^8, 69, 94, 

135, 139. 
"Vision of Poets, A," 20, 23, 

108, 115. 
War, 197-200. 
Watson, W., 218, 220. 
"Weakest Thing, The," 27. 
"Weariness," 85. 
"Weeping Saviour, The," 39. 
White, B., 219. 
Whittier, J. G., 220. 
Wolfe, C, 219. 
Wollstonecraft, M., 156. 
Woman, intellectual rank of, 

156; education of, 152-156; 

right to work, 158; right to 

just literary judgment, 159; 

strong-minded, dislike for, 

215; as artist, 10 1. 
"Woman's Shortcomings, A," 

147. 
Wordsworth, W., 48, 219, 

221. 
Work, 1 1 7-1 20. 
Zerah, in "The Seraphim," 

5o» 73-So, loi. 



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